Understanding Hybrid Cloud Model
Hybrid cloud model is a combination of a
private cloud with one or more public cloud services. Over the years, hybrid cloud deployments have gained vast popularity among enterprises. Hybrid cloud models are deemed powerful as they give businesses greater control over their private data. It also provides businesses with greater flexibility by moving workloads across cloud solutions when needs and costs fluctuate. As per the research conducted by MarketsandMarkets, hybrid clouds are expanding at a 17% compound annual growth rate.
Business Benefits of Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud environment is curated to cater to an organization's specific requirements and hence there is no ‘one’ strategy that you can apply to your business. The hybrid cloud model offers the organization a balanced approach to their computing needs. Some of the hybrid cloud benefits are:
Flexibility in Computing Capacity
With a hybrid cloud, users can scale up or down on their processing power and storage needs. This helps the organization enjoy a secure server while accessing the public
cloud benefits.
Reduced Costs
Hybrid
cloud deployment offers an excellent option for companies looking for more security and control of their data in a cost-effective way. This will help them to scale their operations when required. This helps companies significantly lower IT costs in the long run.
Improved Risk and Security Management
Hybrid cloud computing offers organizations critical control over their data and improves security by reducing the potential exposure of data. In addition, organizations have the option to house their data and workloads based on compliance, policy, or security requirements.
Avoids Vendor Lock-in
Getting locked in with a particular vendor is one of the most common issues faced by an organization. This happens when an organization becomes dependent on a single service provider. Hybrid cloud computing helps the organization take advantage of the cloud without being stuck.
What Are the Impacts of Hybrid Cloud Mix?
The hallmark of a successful hybrid cloud deployment would be to provide the business organization with the best flexibility at the lowest possible price. The hybrid cloud servers ensure that powerful resources are provided to businesses as quickly as they are acquired. This also enables the IT team to easily control, manage, and secure the resources. Recent analysis suggests that hybrid cloud computing platforms offer interoperability and integrated capabilities that generate 2.5 times greater business value than the adoption of a single cloud platform. When coupled with digital and business transformation, hybrid cloud deployment can generate unprecedented strategic and financial benefits for an organization.
Primary Challenges of Hybrid Cloud Computing and Their Solutions
"Organizations that adopt hybrid infrastructure will optimize costs and increase efficiency. However, it increases the complexity of selecting the right toolset to deliver end-to-end services in a multi-sourced" environment.
D. D. Mishra, Research Director at Gartner
Even though hybrid cloud deployment offers a vast array of benefits, there are also some challenges that can significantly impact the growth prospects of an organization. Some of the primary challenges that an organization can face are listed below:
Migration
Moving from any cloud infrastructure to a hybrid cloud environment is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. Migrating to a single or centrally managed hybrid cloud includes integrating different cloud brands and service providers.
The most effective way to handle this situation is by getting assistance from a managed service provider (MSP). Work on a well-articulated cloud migration strategy before initiating
migration and ensure that you have control over the stages of cloud migration.
Compliance
Ensuring compliance with industry standards and governance regulations is a notable issue an organization faces while working on hybrid cloud computing. As sensitive data regularly moves between environments, it is essential to meet compliance guidelines.
To ensure complete compliance, hybrid cloud model components should be evaluated as entirely separate environments but also as a singular environment. Meeting these requirements gets easier when the hybrid cloud is deployed in a data center environment.
Security
With hybrid
cloud computing comes notable complexity, and with complexity comes security risks. With API-driven public clouds, the security practices employed may sometimes not be sufficient and would require the organization to set up additional security protocols.
To effectively overcome this security concern, it is essential that the organization invest in visibility, control, and optimization. All this can be achieved using the right cloud management platform.
Why Opt for a Hybrid Cloud for Your Business?
Hybrid cloud deployment helps an organization with the flexibility to support its remote and distributed employees. Especially in the present scenario, of the pandemic, this is something that many organizations are looking to utilize for the smooth functioning of their workforce. The hybrid cloud also ensures that the organization increases its speed in reaching the end user by optimizing its IT performance and providing the much-required agility to meet changing business demands. With the ability to dynamically scale and absorb, it ensures that any kind of demand fluctuation does not pose a risk to the organization.
Ducati has worked on four different hybrid cloud projects, which include the implementation of disaster recovery and data protection, computing cluster renewal, research for new IT infrastructure models, and data center consolidation.
In the end, they have achieved great results in three key areas, namely data awareness, speed, and minimal footprint. The footprint was reduced by 20 times, while the data center was being used seven times less than before.
Conclusion
In the end, all the pros and cons must be weighed to ensure how effective a hybrid cloud deployment will be for your business. It is essential to ensure that your organization has the capacity to cater to all the requirements of the cloud environment. Hybrid cloud models are the most efficient as they allow you to control sensitive data while also achieving the flexibility to scale operations automatically and securely without putting much burden on you financially.
FAQ
How Does a Hybrid Cloud Work?
There is no defined structure for hybrid cloud architecture. It is a combination of public cloud services and private cloud infrastructure in a variety of ways. While employing a hybrid cloud model, it shares data across both public and private cloud infrastructures.
What Is the Difference Between Hybrid Cloud and Multi-cloud?
Technically, every hybrid cloud model is a type of multi-cloud. More often, multi-cloud refers to the use of multiple public cloud environments to provide access. Whereas, a hybrid cloud involves a combination of public and private clouds.
What Makes Hybrid Cloud an Effective Solution?
There are several reasons why hybrid clouds are considered an effective solution to cloud requirements. Some of the reasons are:
• Highly versatile
• Allows greater control compared to the public cloud
• Controls costs
• Helps highly regulated industries cater to government regulations
• Facilitates the delivery of content globally