What is Hybrid Cloud, Benefits and Features Explained

Cloud is known for providing enterprises the convenience to transform their back-end architecture into remote environments. The technology eliminates the processes involved in setting up, hosting, or scaling back-end systems. To start with, there are three groups of cloud infrastructure. The first is a public cloud, a low-cost structure that is available to the general public as a free or pay-per-use model. It is available for use or purchase over the public Internet and can be sold on-demand to businesses on the basis of the pay-per-usage system.

Private cloud computing is another option to choose from. While it provides public cloud benefits such as self-service and scalability, customers can get a personalized cloud space because it delivers services through a proprietary architecture. A private cloud solely caters to the goals of a single organization and is ideal for enterprises with constantly changing or unpredictable IT needs. This is because the cloud infrastructure offers administrators direct control over their computing environments with improved security an effective data governance strategy.

The hybrid cloud model combines on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services by enabling data and application sharing between the two platforms. 

Let’s look at its features and benefits next.

Hybrid Cloud: A Fusion of Public & Private Clouds

Hybrid Cloud is the most versatile and viable option of all because it harnesses the potential of the public and private cloud service models. It sets apart itself from the other two by facilitating even greater security features, swift connection, easy user and IT administrator access. The interesting thing about this fusion is that even with their unique feature sets, the cloud structures work together to improve operational performance and achieve desired business outcomes.

Virtual Machines (VMs) play a major role in the hybrid cloud deployment process where a hypervisor is necessary for the creation of these VMs. There are different hypervisors available in the market and every enterprise chooses a certain one according to their specific needs. IT teams also need to provide a private cloud software layer for ensuring self-service, automation, scalability, and orchestration. Once your IT department is on board, you can move towards creating a useful infrastructure involving a hybrid cloud to enhance the performance of all departments in your organization.

Benefits of Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud comes with a list of benefits which makes it a perfect cloud architecture for various enterprises handling multiple operations and sensitive information. Let’s describe each benefit it provides:

Secure and Scalable

The hybrid cloud is highly scalable when it comes to managing intensive workloads in competitive business environments. Security of sensitive information is guaranteed on account of the private cloud features that allow businesses to manage regular enterprise operations on a public cloud.

Enhanced Operational Power

It becomes possible to work with various data categories because of the operational power provided by the combination of public and private cloud structures. The IT manager typically allocates resources for managing certain operations.

Offers the Right Balance

A hybrid cloud structure makes it easier to divide workloads between two cloud computing models that offer the maximum capacity to accommodate user demands. This infrastructure offers the best of both worlds in many ways. The private cloud manages critical information, assets, and operations while public cloud computing makes it easier to develop new apps and run robust analytics programs. The hybrid cloud provides closure by allowing businesses to stay competitive with the help of such a versatile platform.

Flexible and Versatile

The hybrid cloud integrates the public cloud model with on-site cloud hardware which offers businesses total control of security, systems, and policies. At the same time, it operates behind a firewall as is the case with the private cloud variation. Hybrid cloud provides great flexibility when it comes to managing varying IT demands. It has the ability to scale up to utilize the public cloud or down to the private cloud.

A Valuable Combination

In this digital age, businesses must not limit their capabilities under any circumstances. For this, they must increase their speed to market and test, prototype, and launch new products before the competition. Hybrid cloud plays a crucial role by making it possible to respond quickly to business needs, changes, and threats with unlimited, on-demand resources at one’s disposal.

Increased Automation

Hybrid cloud helps companies deploy resources and commission them in an automated process and ensure risk management. Consider how difficult and time-consuming things can be when growing businesses must scale their infrastructure where resource utilization projects must be nothing less than accurate. Good hybrid cloud service providers have implemented rules that allow companies to immediately obtain future resources whenever required.

IoT and Hybrid Cloud

The Internet of Things (IoT) is driving device inter-connectivity across enterprise networks on a global scale. According to a study, the number of interconnected devices worldwide is expected to reach 31 billion by the end of 2020. Should this be of interest to you and your business?

The answer is simple. IoT devices are helpful as they collect valuable information that organizations use to make better business strategies and decisions. Powered by the hybrid cloud model, IoT devices can offer better scalability and improved performance in terms of both security and control.

Common Hybrid Cloud Use Cases 

Experts often discuss the relative merits of private and public clouds and which would better suit organizations. In this digital era, hybrid and multi-cloud environments have become the norm, with many use cases for enterprises to choose from. Let’s look at two everyday examples.

1. Business Continuity

Planning and setting up an independent environment for disaster recovery and business continuity can be expensive, especially for SMBs. Leveraging a hybrid cloud model allows an on-premises data center to failover to a public cloud service in the event of an emergency. This is a more economical option, and in case of a disaster, IT can quickly start the application in the public cloud since the data is present there. This leads to considerable cost savings and an improvement in application availability. 

2. Addressing Different Needs

Different businesses have different requirements when it comes to running digital operations. The key requirements generally revolve around hosting files and applications. 

Notably, infrastructure and facilities for public and private cloud computing vary in terms of security, speed, and capacity. On the other hand, the hybrid cloud is capable of delegating resources based on requirements and quality. Moreover, even when local, public, and private clouds provide satisfactory security levels, it is expected that companies would want more layers added to them to protect sensitive data. In such cases, hybrid cloud solutions are ideal for those seeking a secure platform for their capacity demands. 

Hybrid Cloud for Digital Transformation

Cloud computing fuels digital transformation initiatives by minimizing CapEx and OpEx, as well as providing dynamic scalability. As a combination of private and public clouds, the hybrid cloud is considered the most feasible approach to cloud adoption. It integrates all the necessary technologies and supports to deliver enterprise-level cloud adoption. With the right management tools, the hybrid model offers the perfect IT infrastructure model for different use cases. This flexibility increases business agility and allows companies to sync with digital business objectives. 

Take the example of a company that cannot fulfill customer needs with speed and agility because of obsolete IT practices and fragmented computing systems. This can cause it to become less relevant and competitive in a fast-paced market. By implementing hybrid cloud computing, it can significantly minimize its IT service deployment time and put forth customer-facing customers more efficiently. 

Conclusion

Hybrid cloud is beneficial for any kind of organization looking to enhance overall productivity and security, streamline operational cycles, and improve scalability, all at an affordable cost. As every enterprise has different needs, there is no one-size-fits-all solution that can entirely fulfill their demands. 

Hence, it is necessary to get a complete overview of the project scope and match that according to the features and benefits offered by each cloud infrastructure. Even then, as we have seen, the hybrid cloud comes with different characteristics and efficiencies that give it an edge over the private and public variations.