Hybrid Cloud Environments Demand More Agile Infrastructure
In 2025, hybrid cloud environments have emerged as a cornerstone for businesses striving to modernize their IT infrastructure. From leveraging AI-driven tools to enhancing performance, sustainability, and security, hybrid cloud is paving the way for a new era of efficiency and growth. In fact, according to Flexera’s 2024 State of the Cloud Report, 73 percent of enterprises are currently using hybrid cloud environments, reflecting their continued role in balancing flexibility, scalability, and control.
Likewise, according to recent A10 Networks research, The State of Application Load Balancing in 2025, which surveyed over 500 respondents across the USA and EMEA, a cloud-first approach is favored by 44 percent of IT professionals in EMEA. Furthermore, 37 percent have chosen a cloud-native approach, while 44 percent stated that IT modernization was top of their agenda.
Teams Need More Flexibility, Agility, and Scalability
IT teams will therefore be demanding much greater flexibility, agility, and scalability from their underlying infrastructure and application delivery solutions. However, the legacy licensing schemes of such solutions often remain static and with fixed capacity. To complicate things further, IT professionals running a hybrid environment are forced to manage application delivery instances across multiple clouds and on-premises environments, which is difficult, time-consuming, and costly.
While many organizations still face these challenges in 2025, there are now alternative options available that can streamline the process, reduce costs, and make life easier for IT teams.
Historically, software licenses have tended to be perpetual, instance-based, and static, with a fixed capacity. This limits their ability to scale. License schemes are inherently complex, meaning an IT professional could be responsible for managing hundreds or thousands of licenses. These licenses are inflexible and often cannot port across environments.
Efficient Allocation of Capacity Can Be Complex and Costly
As organizations distribute workloads between on-premises and/or more public clouds, efficient allocation of capacity becomes increasingly complex and costly. In fact, 44 percent of our research respondents reported challenges adapting to recent changes in vendor licensing and/or support, while 39 percent had seen a significant increase in licensing costs.
Managing and ensuring the right license for an environment has always been a headache for organizations. And this becomes increasingly complex with hybrid environments. Traditional solutions with inaccurate capacity planning can create financial issues. Many businesses also over-provision to ensure resource availability—resulting in overspending—while others may underestimate future needs and risk service outages.
Both approaches require significant capital outlay and have long procurement cycles, which are restrictive if, for example, an organization wants to course-correct.
This limits IT agility and restricts business operations, prompting organizations to look at flexible licensing models that can scale as requirements grow over time. Additionally, network and service capacity are even more difficult to determine in homogenous environments; this task becomes even more complex when distributed across multiple clouds and on-premises data centers.
FlexPool Consumption-based Licensing
A10 Networks’ FlexPool consumption licensing enables organizations to distribute A10’s security and application delivery services wherever and whenever they are needed. This is a scalable capacity pool that aligns with cloud consumption models to dynamically allocate services and eliminate over-provisioning.
Flexible capacity licensing offers greater value, lower costs, and portability to allow for future capacity planning. It gives organizations freedom of choice with a pool of licenses that can move across virtual, bare metal, and hardware in hybrid cloud infrastructures.
With flexible licensing, organizations can dynamically and flexibly allocate capacity and share the pool as needed. This prevents service disruption. IT teams can mix and match instances and scale them for on-demand consumption.
Additionally, FlexPool allows teams to flexibly allocate and redistribute capacity across data centers and multiple clouds, enabling operational resilience, business continuity, and compliance with new EU regulations like DORA and NIS2.
When to Use a Flexible License Model
When migrating infrastructure to a modern approach, a flexible license model will be critical. Regardless of whether teams are moving to virtualized or DevOps environments or increasing automation, licensing needs to be flexible, portable, and scalable.
Flexibility and scalability mean that:
- The instance capacity can be scalable and changeable, and the license needs to allow either increases or decreases
- The instance can move to another host or location, and the license needs to be migrated or transferred
- The instance can be replaced with a newly created instance for software upgrades, troubleshooting, etc.
In today’s dynamic hybrid cloud environments, where infrastructure is constantly being created and resources are required to move between instances, a flexible, consumption-based model will enable organizations to more cost-effectively manage and optimize their licenses.
