What Is a Hybrid Cloud?

• Hybrid Cloud Definition

  Hybrid Cloud Definition

  A hybrid cloud combines private cloud, public cloud, and on-premises infrastructure and services, creating a powerful and flexible IT framework. This approach allows organizations to address their storage, computing, and networking requirements while seamlessly managing and balancing workloads across different environments to meet their unique business needs.

  Hybrid clouds are often a natural outcome of cloud migrations. Organizations typically transition applications and data gradually instead of all at once. This phased approach reduces risks, minimizes downtime, and allows teams to test and optimize systems during the migration process. However, many organizations permanently adopt a hybrid cloud approach, as it enables them to continue using their on-premises services while also taking advantage of the scalability, flexibility, cost savings, and advanced features offered by public clouds.

  Hybrid clouds aren’t the same as multi-clouds. While a hybrid cloud environment shares data and splits processes between public and private clouds, a multi-cloud environment uses services from multiple public clouds and doesn’t require a private or on-premises cloud. This allows organizations to leverage the unique strengths of different cloud providers, ranging from specialized tools to regional availability. However, some hybrid cloud setups are multi-cloud. For example, an organization might integrate resources from a private cloud with services from several public cloud service providers.
• How Do Hybrid Clouds Work?

  How Do Hybrid Clouds Work?

  Hybrid clouds use resources and services from at least two different computing environments, such as public clouds, private clouds, or on-premises infrastructure. Each type of environment offers unique benefits. Public clouds offer scalability and cost efficiency, private clouds provide enhanced security and control, and on-premises infrastructure allows organizations to integrate their legacy systems. Organizations may also turn to applications or data stores from platform as a service (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS) providers. These companies offer scalable, ready-to-use solutions, allowing businesses to quickly implement and integrate advanced applications with no physical infrastructure investments necessary.

  These environments are typically connected through technologies such as LANs, WANs, virtual private networks (VPNs), and APIs. These technologies help ensure secure, reliable networking, which enables seamless communication and data transfer between the hybrid cloud’s different environments.

  Additionally, hybrid clouds often use orchestration and automation tools to manage workloads across these environments. These tools help optimize performance by ensuring data and applications are accessed where they’re needed most. Essentially, they enable users to quickly share, synchronize, and search for information.
• Hybrid Cloud Solutions

  Hybrid Cloud Solutions

  Hybrid cloud solutions combine the benefits of both public and private clouds, offering organizations a flexible, scalable IT infrastructure. By taking a hybrid cloud approach and using the right solutions, organizations can optimize their IT resources, balance workloads across different environments, and enhance performance while minimizing costs.

  Ultimately, hybrid cloud solutions allow users to consolidate their IT resources and services, easily move workloads between various environments, and orchestrate various processes. Hybrid cloud solutions should also provide an option for unified management along with automated scaling, provisioning, and deployment of applications.
• Hybrid Cloud Architecture

  Hybrid Cloud Architecture

  Every organization’s hybrid cloud architecture looks slightly different, but some elements are common across most hybrid cloud architectures. In most cases, hybrid cloud architecture combines private clouds, public clouds, and on-premises equipment.

  Private clouds are cloud environments run by and exclusively used by the organization itself, offering an incredible level of control. They offer many of the same benefits as cloud computing without entirely sacrificing the sense of security and control that comes with having an on-premises IT infrastructure.

  Meanwhile, public clouds are hosted by third-party infrastructure as a service, PaaS, or SaaS providers. Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services are popular public clouds due to their scalability, reliability, range of services, and cost efficiency. Organizations can access these resources on a subscription or pay-per-use basis.

  On-premises environments are a more traditional form of computing. Instead of taking place in the cloud, on-premises infrastructure, such as servers or hardware, is physically located at an organization’s facilities. As a result, businesses have full control over their computing resources, storage, software, and networking.

  For organizations to efficiently take advantage of all private clouds, public clouds, and on-premises equipment, they’ll need to rely on:

  • Network connectivity: Reliable network connectivity is essential for seamless communication and data transfer between diverse environments. A fast, stable connection enables organizations to efficiently shift workloads between private and public clouds while maintaining the performance and reliability critical to their mission-essential applications. To achieve this, organizations may leverage various technologies, including VPNs for encrypted channels between endpoints, WANs to connect systems across wide geographical areas, LANs for high-speed connections within local networks, and APIs to streamline data integration and management across systems.
  • Virtualization: Virtualization allows organizations to divide a computer’s hardware into various VMs. For example, an organization might have different VMs for memory, processors, and storage. This allows organizations to run several virtual computers, applications, and operating systems on one physical server.
  • Containerization: Containerization—the practice of packaging applications and their dependencies into portable, self-contained units called containers—allows organizations to run applications consistently across different computing environments and infrastructures. Containers are more portable than VMs and are typically lighter in weight, faster to deploy, and easier to scale.
  • A hybrid cloud management platform: A hybrid cloud management platform allows users to easily monitor and manage their resources from a centralized location. Simultaneously managing on-premises, private, and public cloud data and resources can quickly become overwhelming, but common features of hybrid cloud management platforms include tools for resource allocation and management, workload orchestration, data integration from various sources, data governance, and encryption or other methods of protecting sensitive information.
• What Are the Benefits of Hybrid Clouds?

  What Are the Benefits of Hybrid Clouds?

  Hybrid cloud computing is popular today—and with good reason. It offers organizations the flexibility to choose the right environment for their workloads, allowing them to reap all the benefits of both public and private clouds.

  More specifically, by taking a hybrid cloud approach, organizations can:

  • Enjoy a high level of agility: Hybrid cloud setups allow organizations to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions, customer demands, or internal business needs. They can also quickly gain additional computation or storage resources when needed.
  • Strengthen security and improve compliance: Hybrid clouds enable organizations to keep sensitive data and applications on private, on-premises infrastructure or private clouds behind firewalls, giving them more control over security and compliance. Meanwhile, they can shift their less sensitive data and workloads to public cloud resources to save money without sacrificing performance or violating regulatory requirements and data governance policies.
  • Increase scalability and resilience: Hybrid cloud architecture allows organizations to quickly scale public cloud computing and storage resources up or down as their demand changes. This gives them the flexibility needed to ensure continuity during peak times and under unexpected workloads without straining their private cloud or negatively impacting workloads.
  • Set up backup and disaster recovery (BDR): The hybrid approach can provide enhanced resilience by enabling BDR, which requires organizations to copy files and store them in at least one remote location. This means critical data is protected in case of system failures, disasters, or data loss or corruption. When relying solely on on-premises solutions, BDR quickly becomes costly and complex. However, by integrating public cloud resources into the backup strategy, organizations can avoid the need to create and maintain physical offsite backup infrastructure and disaster recovery systems while ensuring they can still easily access and restore data and other resources.
  • Optimize resources and cut costs: Hybrid clouds allow organizations to efficiently allocate resources by shifting less critical workloads to the public cloud. This reduces the strain on on-premises infrastructure and lowers overall costs. The flexibility offered by clouds also means businesses can pay only for the resources they need instead of investing in physical infrastructure, which often winds up underutilized or requires expensive maintenance.
  • Build artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs): Organizations often want to build generative AI LLMs, but doing so requires a highly skilled, knowledgeable team and a significant amount of computational power, data, and resources. This can make developing and running AI LLMs solely on on-premises hardware expensive and logistically challenging. As a result, many organizations turn to cloud services to handle the computational demands, allowing them to scale resources more efficiently and reduce the upfront costs associated with maintaining on-premises infrastructure.
  • Develop and test applications: Organizations can avoid the costs and complexities associated with purchasing and configuring physical, on-premises hardware by leveraging cloud services. Not only can they save money by taking a hybrid cloud approach, but they can also enjoy the flexibility to quickly and easily scale resources up or down as needed.
  • Seamlessly adopt new technology: Hybrid clouds allow organizations to easily integrate new technologies into their existing infrastructure. They can use public cloud services for testing, development, and scaling, which allows for rapid innovation and experimentation with minimal disruption.
  • Continue to use and improve legacy applications: Organizations don’t have to stop using their legacy applications and systems when they shift to a hybrid cloud approach. Instead, they can maintain and enhance their legacy applications while also enjoying what newer cloud-based technologies have to offer.
  • Migrate to the cloud: Hybrid clouds provide a flexible path for organizations to migrate their workloads to the cloud at their own pace, ensuring they can maintain control over critical applications while gradually shifting to a fully cloud-based environment.
  • Complete mergers and acquisitions: Organizations often face the challenge of integrating disparate IT systems, data, and infrastructure during mergers and acquisitions. Fortunately, a hybrid cloud can make the process of combining the data applications from the old and new entities easier and cheaper, helping to ensure business continuity and setting up the new organization for success.