A European government passport agency considers upgrading its IT systems to increase performance and workload flexibility in response to constantly changing requirements. The budget manager wants to…

On-premises infrastructure requires large upfront capital expenditure for hardware and dedicated IT staff, directly contradicting the budget manager's goals.

Private cloud reduces some operational burden but still demands significant capital investment in dedicated hardware and skilled staff to build and maintain the environment.

While public cloud minimizes capital expenses, a government passport agency handling sensitive citizen data is subject to European data protection regulations that restrict full reliance on shared public cloud infrastructure.

Hybrid cloud allows the agency to retain sensitive passport and citizen data in a private or on-premises environment to meet European data sovereignty and compliance obligations, while using public cloud resources for flexible, low-cost compute capacity during peak periods. This directly reduces capital expenditure on hardware and lowers IT staffing needs compared to a fully on-premises model. The hybrid model addresses both the budget manager's cost goals and the operational requirement to handle constantly changing workloads.