What Is Hybrid Cloud And How Does It Work?
Hybrid Cloud is a cloud computing solution that combines at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud, with proprietary software enabling communication between each discrete service.
A Hybrid cloud strategy provides orchestration, management, and application portability among cloud services. This kind of portability creates a single, flexible, and cost-optimal IT infrastructure for efficiently running a company’s workloads. Here, the workload can be network, hosting, web service features of an application, etc.
A Hybrid cloud strategy gives businesses greater control over their private data. Companies can store their sensitive data in an on-premises data center while simultaneously benefitting from the robust computational resources of a managed public cloud. This makes it more powerful than any private cloud or public cloud alone.
Unlike multi-cloud models, a Hybrid cloud strategy works by creating a single environment that operates in both on-premises, private resources, and public resources hosted by third-party public cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure). Whereas multi-cloud doesn’t involve private cloud at all.
The most important feature of the hybrid cloud model is that it allows enterprises to move the workloads between private and public clouds whenever there is a change in computing needs or costs. This means businesses get more data deployment options with greater flexibility.
Hybrid Cloud Architecture
A fully established hybrid cloud architecture comprises three major components:
- Public infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure.
- Compatible private resources, such as on-premises data centers with APIs and suitable hardware for compatibility; and
- An adequate network connection between 1 & 2, which may include LAN, WAN, or dedicated networking service for additional security.
Hybrid Cloud Benefits
A Hybrid Cloud allows companies to choose cloud services that best suit their needs. Companies can allocate optimal cloud computing architecture and environment for each workload while always having the option of interoperability. Such features help companies achieve their technical and business objectives more effectively. In fact, it has been proven in a study by IBM that companies drive up 2.5 times the value from Hybrid Cloud than from a single-cloud, single-vendor approach. Listed are some key benefits of Hybrid Cloud:
1. Flexibility
Enterprises can build Hybrid cloud solutions that work for their needs, using traditional systems and the latest best-of-breed cloud services. Besides, companies can combine services and functionalities from multiple cloud computing vendors, so no need to commit to a single vendor. Users can work with various types of data in different environments. Hybrid cloud also allows its users to freely move workloads between private and public cloud as circumstances change.
2. Cost Management
Hybrid cloud solutions help businesses with resource optimization and cost savings. The organizations can run workloads with predictable capacity on their private cloud or data center infrastructure, which requires significant capital expenditures and fixed costs. They can also migrate more variable workloads to the cost-optimal public cloud. For example, a European bank developed and deployed Hybrid cloud solutions and moved their entire mid-range environment to the cloud, anticipating savings of up to 40% on costs.
3. Agility And Business Scalability
Hybrid cloud offers more resource options through a public cloud compared to an organization’s physical data center. This means with the use of public cloud compute and cloud storage resources, the provision, deployment, and scale-up of operations become easy, quick, automatic, and inexpensive. Thus, it allows services to continue smoothly even when there are unplanned spikes in traffic without impacting private cloud workloads (which is referred to as ‘cloud bursting).
4. Greater Infrastructure Efficiency
Hybrid cloud infrastructure provides extensive control over resources. So, the development and IT operations teams can optimize the distribution of costs and time effectively across private clouds, public cloud services, and cloud vendors. Hybrid cloud also helps companies avoid technical debt or the implied costs of using on-premises infrastructure by migrating legacy applications faster.
5. Improved Regulatory Compliance And Security
A Hybrid cloud platform lets organizations implement the best cloud security and regulatory compliance technologies across all environments in a consistent way. Companies in highly regulated industries cannot move all workloads to a public cloud because of the compliance restriction on data. So, companies can reserve private cloud resources for sensitive and highly regulated data and use more economical public cloud resources for less sensitive data to meet regulatory requirements. However, companies still can move data to an alternative cloud where regulated workloads are operating, when necessary.
6. Overall Business Acceleration
A unified Hybrid cloud platform assists organizations gain a competitive edge by aiding s of business operations. This includes shorter product development cycles, quick response to customer feedback, accelerated innovation and time-to-market, faster delivery of applications to clients, and collaboration with partners and third-party for delivering new products and services.
Conclusion
A Hybrid cloud platform is an effective way to align IT priorities with business needs. It has the potential of lowering costs of IT ownership, improving operating margins, and speeding up innovation within a business. All that companies need to do is establish a cloud steering committee to recognize benefits and prioritize hybrid cloud opportunities that deliver against their business goals.
