It seems like everyone is raving about “going hybrid” these days. What exactly is the hybrid cloud, why it’s significant, and how would it work for your business – we explore below.
A hybrid cloud is certainly a powerful computing environment because it supplies businesses with greater control over their data, among many other advantages. Put simply, it’s a creative solution that allows applications and data to be shared between a combination of public and private clouds.
Computing demand frequently fluctuates; that’s when the hybrid cloud comes in play by providing enterprises with the ability to continuously scale their on-prem infrastructure up to the used public clouds to control any overflow – all the whilst keeping third-party datacentres at bay. This way, critical workloads, data, and applications are kept on-prem, safely secured.
This is one of the reasons why the hybrid cloud is increasingly emerging as a feasible option for those businesses that are looking to benefit from the efficiency and scalability that cloud computing has to offer, while still keeping some of their operations running on-prem. It provides enterprises with the powerful flexibility of moving their workloads between various cloud solutions as costs and needs shift.
How Does It Work?
A hybrid cloud is essentially an IT architecture that manages to incorporate workloads across two or more environments.
These environments may include:
- One private cloud + one public cloud
- Two or more public clouds
- Two or more private clouds
In short, separate cloud environments become hybrid exclusively through their seamless connection, or in other words, interconnectivity. And that’s exactly what makes this architecture the foundation of edge computing.
Thanks to interconnectivity, workloads are efficiently moved and processes are easily orchestrated. The performances of these connections have a direct impact on the effectiveness of your hybrid cloud.
What Are Its Benefits?
One would argue the primary advantage of adopting a hybrid cloud approach to be the agility that it provides. A digital business needs to quickly adapt to ongoing changes, which might increase its demands for combining private and public clouds with on-prem resources to obtain the agility that it needs for a competitive edge.
Another benefit lies with the added flexibility that a hybrid cloud allows in server designs. This in turn gives enterprises the ability to rapidly provision storage at relatively lower costs.
Adopting the hybrid cloud approach optimizes costs in several ways. For instance, one of the main ideas behind using cloud services is that users only pay for the extra commute time when resources are needed – something called an “on-demand utilization”.
This key idea is leveraged even more through the hybrid approach. Some businesses require significant amounts of computing time during their peak seasons. During periods like these, extending to the public cloud presents itself as an economical alternative to idling workloads on a private infrastructure for most of the year.
All in all, one might argue that enterprise decision-makers have greater control over a combination of public and private clouds as opposed to only using a public cloud platform. It allows for increased flexibility to meet varying needs.
Who Uses Hybrid Cloud?
There is a spectrum of industries that are increasingly adopting hybrid solutions, with the primary aim of reducing their costs and resource utilization. The fields that tend to adopt the hybrid approach are usually inclined towards utilizing cloud-native.
From the health care sector to finance and media, hybrid cloud environments prove their functionality not only at optimizing limited supplies of on-prem physical infrastructures but also greatly improving storage and computing power.
In this sense, hybrid clouds are often deployed in the healthcare sector, where the need to securely transfer data between healthcare providers and patients is of crucial importance.
A similar goes for the finance industry, where having an ability to push orders through the private cloud and run analytics on trading from the public cloud significantly decreases the volume of physical space needed to perform these tasks. It should be noted that data security is of utmost concern and priority for organizations in these sectors.
Why Hybrid Matters
The hybrid cloud approach is a significant solution offered as part of cloud services and hence is a substantial subject for discussions in this field.
The hybrid cloud matters to organizations medium and large in scale due to its many advantages that are otherwise unachievable while operating exclusively in the private or the public clouds.
Lately, smaller enterprises are also increasingly adopting hybrid cloud, thanks to a plethora of tools offered by various cloud service providers, which allow those businesses to build a flexible, agile, and secure environment.
Of course, every approach has its drawbacks, and the hybrid cloud is no exception. In this type of environment, network connectivity and API compatibility are of utmost importance because workloads and data that is distributed across private and public clouds have to be able to seamlessly interact with each other. And that becomes a problem when connectivity is lacking in performance.
A further drawback is the increased threat of attack surfaces compared to the exclusive use of either the private or public clouds. Most certainly, the hybrid cloud requires a more all-round approach that would take both internal and external infrastructures into account and treat them as a sole ecosystem.
Migrating To The Hybrid Cloud
Adopting a hybrid cloud approach might become an overwhelming journey. It’s a good idea to set up a comprehensive plan with multiple options to understand the need for this type of migration and how it will help your business achieve the benefits that hybrid cloud offers.
Hence, developing a detailed cloud migration strategy is a must. Identify the workloads that would be the primary candidates for hybrid cloud adoption, further examining their infrastructure dependencies and applications.
It’s important to remember that the workloads most suitable for such a move should be optimized for performance, cost, security, and usage before your migration strategy is outlined. And if ever in doubt, use the help of a solution-focused partner to make the best of your cloud migration journey.
Why Clouve
Not only do our cloud experts have the knowledge and prowess to effectively help you plan with your move to the cloud, but we’re also here to provide you with all-round support as your migration takes place.
We take the hurdles out of the complex journey of deploying an IT department in the cloud by providing the right tools that you need to stay ahead of your game.
Our complete coverage includes migration from on-prem to major CSPs, monitoring and maintenance, configuration, automation tools, troubleshooting and so much more.
Best of all, we operate on a subscription-based system – meaning you only pay for the services used, whenever you need to.
Get in touch with us today to learn more.
