Today more than ever cloud computing is the focus of IT decision makers and corporate bean counters not to mention thousands of cloud salespeople. There is a lot of confusion around what cloud is and the various types of cloud solutions such as private cloud, public cloud and even more confusing "hybrid cloud". So what is it and how can it benefit my business?
Hybrid Cloud is a cloud computingenvironment which uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud (dedicated server in a data center) and third-party, public cloud (distributed across many shared servers such as AWS) services with orchestration between the two platforms.
The term hybrid cloud was pretty much invented by vendors and carries a lot of marketing hype behind it. Hybrid cloud is a the combination of one or more public cloud providers with your existing private cloud in your data center. The public cloud and private infrastructure operate independently from each other but are able to communicate over an encrypted connection using technology that allows portability of data and applications.
So what's the benefit?
The hybrid arrangement allows you to store protected or sensitive data in your private cloud while also taking advantage of and leveraging computing resources from the public cloud to run applications that rely on that data. This keeps data exposure to a bare minimum because you are not storing sensitive data long term on public cloud.
The key here is having a single management interface...you have storage on one cloud and compute on another. Many companies find it easier to just deploy a multi-cloud strategyand manage different environments.
Building a hybrid cloud with private infrastructure that's not being pushed through the public internet greatly reduces latency in comparison to public cloud services. They can be effective for a business with a tight focus on security or unique physical demands. Ultimately hybrid allows organizations to leverage public cloud services without offloading the entirety of their data to a third party data center. This provides a great deal of flexibility while keeping vital components within the company firewall.
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