While business workloads are increasingly being moved to the cloud, certain situations—such as regulatory hurdles, security concerns, reliance on legacy applications, or abnormal data sets or workflows—have been encumbrances to migrating entire organizations to public cloud providers. The solution is the hybrid cloud model, which leverages the advantages of public cloud providers (rapid resource provisioning and usage-based billing), while retaining the speed and reliability of private cloud solutions, and making organizations more capable of avoiding vendor lock-in.
Executive summary
- What is hybrid cloud? Hybrid cloud is the combination of compute and storage products from public cloud providers and private, on-premises hardware.
- Why does hybrid cloud matter? Hybrid cloud systems do not have a single point of failure, and can be very effectively utilized for industries with variable workloads.
- Who does hybrid cloud affect? Any industry with at minimum a need to safeguard data against loss can utilize a hybrid cloud solution.
- What vendors offer hybrid cloud solutions? Vendors are becoming more responsive to the complexities of managing hybrid cloud deployments and are offering more solutions and tools to assist in transition and deployment.
- How do I build a hybrid cloud? Building a hybrid cloud for your organization requires planning and forethought. Working with vendors to find solutions to your needs is advisable.
What is hybrid cloud?
Hybrid cloud is the combination of compute or storage products from public cloud services with a private cloud infrastructure—servers that are generally on-premises running a cloud software stack. The public and private environments operate effectively independently of each other, and communicate over an encrypted connection, either through the public internet or through a private dedicated link.
In optimal deployments, hybrid cloud provides the best of both worlds of computing. Public cloud service providers offer the ability to instantly provision compute and storage resources on demand, without the extensive upfront costs and time needed to build an on-premise solution. It also enables organizations to leverage AI-powered services delivered exclusively through the cloud.
The private cloud component delivers information quickly, and it does not rely on internet connectivity to operate. Cost is a substantial factor for many organizations. For industries with seasonal or variable workloads, assembling a private cloud to handle normal workloads while relying on public cloud resources to handle burst workloads can be a budget-friendly IT strategy.
Who does hybrid cloud affect?
Hybrid cloud technology is used in a variety of industries; foremost among these is the financial sector, where proximity to network edges (such as adjacency to a trading floor) is vital. As trade orders and high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithms have sensitivities to the millisecond level, the optimal solution is to put the necessary hardware on-premises for trading, while relying on the public cloud component for analytics and projections. Considering the premium of physical space in urban centers where such businesses reside, leveraging hybrid cloud architecture substantively decreases the physical footprint needed for investment firms.
Hybrid cloud also has a firm foothold in the healthcare industry, due in part to the decentralized nature of healthcare—the task of relaying patient information between multiple healthcare providers and insurance companies is a singularly challenging endeavor. The attention that must be paid to regulatory compliance is also quite high, as HIPAA patient privacy provisions require substantive effort in limiting information sharing and compartmentalizing information to prevent unlawful disclosure.
In general, any organization that has an acute need to safeguard against potential loss of sensitive data, resulting from hardware failure, misplaced or stolen hardware, or natural disaster has a reasonable use case for a hybrid cloud deployment.
How do I build a hybrid cloud?
While migrating to hybrid cloud is not a particularly difficult task, it can be a laborious one. Relative to other areas of technology, the equation is not as straightforward as swiping a credit card, opening a box, and plugging it in. Determining what balance to strike between delegating roles to public and private cloud components is a task that should be given a great deal of forethought before reaching the implementation stage.
Various vendors provide hybrid cloud service with hardware or strategies for the private cloud component of this buildout. Finding a vendor that specializes in your industry area, and that has expertise in compliance with any regulatory frameworks your organization is subject to is an important first step to cloud adoption.
Learn how CDNetworks can help with your Cloud Computing needs at https://www.cdnetworks.com/cloud-computing/
Source: Tech republic
