According to a Forrester study, the hybrid cloud is no longer an ignorable luxury but a must-have option for workloads that can benefit from elasticity and that are built to scale and perform to cloud economics.
Hybrid cloud is a logical middle-ground between having all services on-premises and offloading computing to the cloud. This two-pronged hybrid approach where companies store data on both on-premises and cloud arose from the realization of companies that they need a variety of different cloud services to meet a variety of customer needs.
Private vs public vs hybrid cloud:
Before cloud, companies would buy their own infrastructure: physical servers, storage, networking and set them up. This company owned infrastructure is a private cloud (also known as on-premises infrastructure). Having a private cloud meant that somebody within the company had to manage this infrastructure for maintenance, updates, fixing and replacing components etc. This physical infrastructure and its maintenance cost a lot of money and time for the company.
Then came the cloud, which essentially means somebody else (Amazon, Microsoft) bought all the servers, routers, switches etc. and set up the physical infrastructure and they are allowing you to access it and use it to run your applications.
A hybrid cloud is not a different cloud altogether, its just that both the private and the public clouds work together to meet the organization needs. This allows to switch between different delivery models based on security and scalability requirements. Hybrid clouds also gives on-demand scalability (up and down) without the hardware investment making the company more agile.
Consider an application that must respond to scaling customer demand, holiday fluctuations or is rolling out a new mobile application; there is going to be a certain level of uncertainty for the demand the company is going to have. This component makes perfect sense to move to the elastic infrastructure of the hybrid cloud, i.e., cloud bursting.
Companies mired in migration paralysis are being left behind. The top two barriers to hybrid cloud adoption are:
- Complexity of migration process
- Security concerns
But, when opting for a phased approach, these worries become unfounded. Companies taking a hybrid approach to cloud report an improvement in security, flexibility and see a faster sales cycle. If configured properly, hybrid cloud can help with business continuity and disaster recovery.
Benefits of going hybrid
Best of both worlds:
A hybrid solution which combines the best aspect of both worlds, i.e. private and public clouds.
Better control:
The control of what runs where is better enhanced by the hybrid cloud. For example, using private cloud for security sensitive applications and public cloud for applications that have high traffic volumes but are not that security sensitive.
Cost effective
With the hybrid cloud, the only time needed to use the public cloud resources is when there is a sudden spike in demand. You burst through to the public cloud to use that additional computing provided by the public cloud. When the demand subsides, just scale down to the private cloud!
Taking advantage of existing infrastructure
Very often when a company is running a workload on-premises and decides to migrate to cloud, the existing hardware, which the company bought and paid for, just sits idle because it no longer has a workload to run. But with the hybrid cloud, on-premises resources are still utilized as they are combined with the resources that reside in the public cloud. This compelling benefit allows the companies to continue to still use that hardware that exists within their data center.
Flexibility
With the hybrid cloud, you are free to host the workloads and data in the location that makes the most sense based on factors such as cost, compliance requirements and workload logistics.
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