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Computers & Software

Hybrid Cloud to Navigate Challenges to Success

Cloud-based deployments are fast gaining currency, with more future-focused businesses looking to drive business efficiency.

Case in point: End-user investment in the public cloud is forecasted to rise 20.7% to a total of USD 591.8 billion in 2023—up from USD 490.3 billion in 2022, according to a report published by Gartner, Inc.

However, mission-critical workloads and IT systems still need to be deployed in on-prem data centres due to key considerations such as privacy, security, and meeting regulatory mandates. The result: enterprises are fast transitioning to hybrid cloud infrastructure. Improved flexibility, cost-savings, better storage capacity, and efficient processing are the key factors contributing to the rapid increase in hybrid cloud adoption.

With a hybrid cloud strategy in alignment with their multi-cloud deployments, enterprises can rely on their on-prem infrastructure for mission-critical systems while also making the most of the public cloud environment, according to a recent Forbes article. 

Over 92% of enterprises today have a multi-cloud strategy in action or underway, and around 82% of big organisations have already implemented a hybrid cloud infrastructure. 

But why is hybrid cloud deployment gaining momentum today?

Let’s go through how hybrid cloud environments benefit businesses:

Flexibility with hybrid cloud

With a hybrid cloud approach, enterprises can leverage the public cloud to scale up or down their resource usage in response to their changing business requirements.

It means that instead of restricting users within the capacity of their in-house data centres, a hybrid cloud infrastructure helps optimise data workloads while also offering data management flexibility. Thus, enterprises can efficiently attain measurable cost structures with improved flexibility.

Improved flexibility with hybrid cloud environments helps gain a competitive edge as today’s complex macroeconomic conditions continue to challenge businesses worldwide.

Helps address data storage complexities

A hybrid cloud infrastructure facilitates decision-making by providing businesses with a more flexible data storage framework.

The practice of storing enterprise data in individual repositories unique for each data centre makes the data storage process extremely fragmented and intricate. 

The result: inefficient data operations leading to bottlenecks.

In an effort to aggregate and update both structured and unstructured data in a single repository, enterprises are fast adopting the data lakehouse across their hybrid cloud architecture. 

It’s a highly secure system that offers prompt access to data and essential analytics tools, merging the advantages of data lakes and data warehouses.

In short, this hybrid approach to data storage streamlines data access and administration to help enterprises get an in-depth insight into their mission-critical data.

Another critical feature of the hybrid data strategy is its flexible resource pooling. By pooling data together—regardless of where its physical location—hybrid cloud environments help break down data silos and ensure unified data management. Enhanced data management is a huge boon for organisations looking to modernise their operations.

Delivers faster business outcomes

Hybrid cloud allows enterprises to assert better control over their business-critical data and secure their systems from potential data exposure. 

Even better, they can decide where to house their critical business data and workloads based on security, policy, and compliance needs.

In addition, with a hybrid cloud, an enterprise can efficiently optimise and balance its on-prem and public cloud resources. No dependency on a single cloud service provider means no vendor lock-in. 

By enabling businesses to leverage and switch between public, on-prem, and private cloud environments, hybrid cloud infrastructure helps drive agility that, in turn, delivers faster business outcomes.

Importance of hybrid cloud management

The ever-evolving user behaviour, pandemic-induced implications, and extreme business competition have brought hybrid and multi-cloud environments into the mainstream.

However, the biggest challenge is to ensure efficient monitoring, maintenance, and management of the hybrid environments across multiple platforms. 

But what’s the solution?

Leveraging high-end cloud operations and data management services that can proactively manage hybrid and multi-cloud environments across public and private clouds.

Heavily relying on analytics, such a service can address both orchestrated and non-orchestrated IT resources with different layers of cloud operation management. 

It provides a single pane of glass for hybrid cloud management, ensuring enhanced visibility and control while dodging unnecessary cloud sprawl. 

The result: a highly automated and self-service-driven hybrid cloud infrastructure that can dynamically scale operations.

Tilt the game in your favour and turbo-charge your competitive edge with a hybrid cloud operations platform. 

Categories
Personal Finance Real Estate Stock Market News U.K

UK House Prices Will Continue to Plunge in 2023

The real estate market in the UK started on a high last year, continuing a period of fast expansion that began early in the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to low-interest, “race for space” rates and stamp duty land tax cuts throughout lockdowns. 

But the mood changed drastically in the second half of 2022, making buyers reevaluate their moving plans. 

What a difference a year has made! 

According to a report published in City Monitor, UK house prices are forecasted to continue plunging this year after a record-high fall of 2.3% in November 2022. Analysts unanimously agreed that 2023 is set to face the biggest slump in property prices since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. 

“Although a housing market downturn was widely expected by economists (including us), the monthly drop in the December survey far exceeds our and consensus’ expectation,” said Kallum Pickering, the chief UK economist at Berenberg.

Reasons behind the recent drop in house price in the UK

The increasing cost of living and the rising inflation rate looming over the UK are two key factors contributing to the rapid cooling in buyer demand and sales activities.

City Monitor marks the recent hike in mortgage rates as another leading player that caused sales to slip to a 12-year low.

The result: the UK property market is anticipated to fall staggeringly in 2023.

Research is frequently being conducted on the extent and impact of this decline in house prices. Case in point: The Nationwide Building Society projects a 5% fall in price that can be as high as 30% in the worst case scenario. Oxford Economics and Capital Economics forecast this drop to be around 12%. On the other hand, Halifax predicts a decline of 8% in house prices in 2023. 

Impact of drop in house price in the UK

The recent decline in house prices will affect people planning to relocate. The reason: sellers may not put their properties on to the market for sale, finding it less profitable.

In addition, if the current hike in interest rate shows no signs of dropping, a huge percentage of people will have to shift from fixed-rate mortgages to new higher rates. More and more property owners will end up selling their houses if they fail to afford the inflated mortgage rates.

That said, the current housing market downturn has benefits and drawbacks as well. While first-time buyers will find and purchase property at a more reasonable price, homeowners will face substantial losses or even negative equity while selling their properties.

The role of high interest rate in the house price drop

In an effort to check the current inflation, the Bank of England increased the UK base rate by 0.5 percentage points to 3.5% in December 2022—the highest in the past 14 years.

However, an increase in the interest rate doesn’t necessarily result in decreased house prices. But if the rate stays high for a long time, it can make property prices fall sharply. 

The reason: persistently high interest rate makes people less interested in borrowing which negatively impacts the property market. 

London’s luxury houses are defying UK’s home sales slowdown

Even though the UK’s property market is witnessing abrupt changes this year, it’s still not playing out in London’s luxury property market.

“In 2022, sales of £5 million plus homes, which account for just 8 percent of the prime London housing market, were 63 percent higher than their pre-pandemic average,” said Anthony Payne, managing director at LonRes. “It’s not surprising, therefore, that it tempted would-be sellers to put their homes onto the market.”

With London’s expensive and luxury homes defying the current slowdown in the UK’s property market, real estate agents are expecting a ‘burst of activity’ this year in London.

In addition, the weakness in the pound against the dollar is luring more international customers to London’s luxury properties.

For example, being superbly connected to Central London, Blackfriars and Marylebone have become two of the most sought-after places to settle down. 

In such a case, a high-end luxury real estate company can help buyers, sellers, tenants, and landlords make the most profitable deal. 

A top-tier real estate agent has extensive market knowledge, professional networks, and excellent negotiating skills. They can efficiently find the property worth selling, purchasing, or even renting for their potential clients. For example, while a real estate agent ensures efficient property valuation on behalf of a seller, they help buyers figure out the best-asking price. 

Regardless of the transaction taking place, a high-end real estate service always considers their clients’ interest and offers the best services, locations and connections when it comes to selling luxury properties in the neighbourhood areas of London.

Wrapping up

The hike in mortgage and interest rates had a knock-on effect on home sales and demand. Even worse, the UK base rate is projected to increase further and peak at 4.25% as the BoE looks to bring back down inflation. It will be the tenth time in a row for the bank to hike the interest rate since December 2022. However, as part of an effort to repair the damage, lenders have started lowering the mortgage rate even though the base rate is going up.