Cloud-based solutions have become a necessity for companies across the globe. A recent Forrester study discovered that 88% of organizations are adopting a hybrid IT approach, and 89% acknowledge that adoption includes a dedicated hybrid cloud strategy.
Hybrid cloud solutions are basically, solutions with a combination of public cloud hosting from an Infrastructure-as-a-service provider like Amazon, Microsoft’s Azure, or Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) with a facility of internal private cloud. These is a unique combination of public and private clouds each having their own separate data centres, housed in different geographic locations. Both the interfaces interact within a encrypted network, to activate applications, datasets and vital information exchange.
Hybrid cloud is not just a single cloud with private and public cloud applications rather it is a mix of two independent cloud systems together. Companies often choose hybrid solution as an option to join for data storage, processing, security of sensitive data accessible via private cloud while leveraging public cloud features and resources.
Years back when cloud services were in its nascent stage, hybrid was the only medium that companies were using as the facility of cloud. It proved to be an effective way to utilise the cloud and a milestone for cloud services solutions. Now that the transition to cloud is almost inevitable, hybrid cloud remains the best option for enterprises. According to a survey around the usage of cloud, 91% of organizations are using public cloud solutions in some way, and 69% of them are using a hybrid cloud approach.
Transitioning to hybrid cloud has multiple benefits for companies:
- Dependency on a third-party provider reduces when it comes to IT infrastructure. Often infrastructure companies have entire control on the data management of the cloud.
- Lot of times companies don’t invest especially in private cloud networks as to build an infrastructure of that scale requires huge investment to build, maintain, and eventually extend the network. With hybrid cloud offerings, businesses can take advantage of varieties of public cloud services to quickly ascertain additional computing resources as needed.
- Industries such as oil and gas, manufacturing and other hardware industries have specific geographical limitations, with respect to data storage, management, and transportation, due to multiple regulations in place either by the government or industry body. Some enterprises the requirement of data is to be geographically laid out in manner that back up and recovery can be made easier. A hybrid cloud model makes it easier to follow such requirements.
Use of hybrid cloud management in applications:
Hybrid cloud entire framework includes multiple environments and types of modules, and thus hybrid cloud management is a complex function to run. There are multiple strategies and equipment to correct the complexities of hybrid cloud and narrow down approach across spectrum.
Implementation of hybrid cloud management practices to regain control.
There is a need to establish a set governance policy that illustrates processes for important activities like resource allocation, control regulations, restabilising configurations, manage controls of internal and external operations.
Hybrid cloud can easily operate and control, both on premise and cloud-based resources and provide options to reduce cost, enhance performance, monitor system, report errors and secure systems. There are multiple such third-party hybrid cloud management tools to choose from, that are available in the market basis the need of the organization. Companies can explore and test different features within a conducive environment to choose the hybrid cloud management tool that suits your organization’s particular hybrid architecture.
Hybrid cloud offers companies a set of mixed tools for deploying data and various application by helping to improve the IT infrastructure. It further delegates some resources to the cloud and retain some applications and data on premises. Below are some of the used cases of deploying hybrid cloud
Recovery: A hybrid cloud helps organizations clone the on-premises data and various applications on the cloud as a back up. If there’s a disruption in the data center, workloads might fail. This needs to be handled carefully to avoid and challenges hybrid cloud can encounter, namely hinderance to workload consumption and smooth functioning of data.
Testing the apps: It’s very cost effective to develop and test applications and application buckets in the public cloud because the on-premise infrastructure is either minimal or can be completely avoided, this also helps in reducing cost.
Processing high end data: Hybrid cloud gives a company the option to access data from the public cloud services with larger neural networks, to run any analysis on locally stored and available data.
Hybrid cloud has multiple benefits and used cases and with time higher application ratio due to the flexibility it can provide to the enterprises.
