Hybrid Cloud: The Best of Both Worlds for Business Agility

Many organizations today are adopting a hybrid cloud approach, combining the benefits of public, private, and on-premises infrastructure. This strategy provides the agility that digital businesses need to stay competitive in today's fast-paced business environment.

The Power of Public Clouds

Renting computing resources from public cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud provides immense advantages for businesses looking to scale rapidly and remain nimble. Some of the key benefits of public clouds include:

• Massive scale - Public clouds operate on a massive, hyperscale level that allows virtually unlimited expansion of computing resources. This makes it easy to scale infrastructure up or down to meet fluctuating demand.
• Flexibility - Resources can be spun up or down on demand, with no long-term commitments. This makes public clouds ideal for spiky workloads that are hard to predict.
• Cost savings compared to traditional on-premises data centers. The pay-as-you-go model shifts infrastructure costs from capital expenditures to operating expenses. Businesses only pay for the resources they use.

These hyperscale clouds are extremely reliable thanks to their distributed infrastructure with built-in redundancy. Leading providers have data centers across multiple geographic regions, guarding against localized outages. You get access to enterprise-grade infrastructure without having to build it yourself.

However, there are some downsides to relying solely on the public cloud. Businesses lose a certain level of control, customization, and visibility when using public cloud services. There are also potential security and compliance risks associated with storing sensitive data in the public cloud.

Keeping Control with Private Clouds

Private clouds give businesses more:

• Control over resources, security, and governance. Businesses manage a private cloud themselves or with a dedicated service provider.
• Customization to meet specific needs by tailoring the infrastructure and services. This is harder to achieve using generic public cloud platforms.
• Security by keeping systems and data behind a firewall. Private clouds better isolate sensitive applications and regulated data.

The tradeoff compared to the public cloud is higher upfront investment and ongoing management responsibilities. Building and operating a private cloud has significant staffing, hardware, and maintenance costs.

Still, private clouds better suit applications with sensitive data like financial records or healthcare data. They also work well for core legacy systems and workloads requiring specific configurations not easily replicated in the public cloud.

For many organizations, a private cloud strikes the right balance of control, security, and performance for business-critical systems. It serves as a complement to public cloud services.

Getting the Best of Both Worlds

A hybrid cloud combines public cloud services, private cloud resources, and existing on-premises infrastructure. These diverse environments are tied together via orchestration and unified data services to act as a flexible, unified whole.

This hybrid model lets organizations get the benefits of both public and private clouds:

• Dynamically scale infrastructure up or down using public cloud services, while keeping business-critical apps and sensitive data secure on private cloud or on-premises resources.
• Move non-sensitive workloads such as development, testing, and analytics to the public cloud, while keeping core transactional systems and regulated data on-premises or on a private cloud.
• Handle spikes in demand on websites, applications, and services by routing excess traffic to public cloud resources. Burstable capacity from the public cloud provides cost-effective scaling.
• Easily move apps and data across cloud environments as priorities and needs change. A hybrid cloud allows a "lift and shift" approach.

 

A hybrid approach provides maximum flexibility both now and in the future. Organizations can start small with a single application or project, validate the benefits, and then expand their cloud footprint incrementally.

The key is having a connected infrastructure enabled by solutions like NetApp's Data Fabric. This ties disparate public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments together under unified data management and seamless data mobility.

With a hybrid cloud foundation, organizations can balance agility, security, performance, and cost-efficiency. By matching workloads to the optimal environment, you get the best of both worlds. A hybrid model is ideal for most enterprises today.

Hybrid Cloud Use Cases

There are many real-world examples of organizations unlocking business value using a hybrid cloud model:

• A media company handles customer-facing web properties and streaming services on the public cloud, while keeping media asset management and editing software on the private cloud for security and performance.
• A retailer scales out e-commerce ordering systems on public cloud to handle Black Friday sales spikes, while maintaining inventory and supply chain software on-premises integrated with warehouse robots.
• A hospital uses the public cloud for medical imaging analytics and telehealth video services, while keeping electronic health records (EHR) in the private cloud to comply with HIPAA regulations.
• A manufacturer performs computer-aided design (CAD) and simulations on public cloud to accelerate product development, while running computer numerical control (CNC) machining code on on-premises systems.
• A finance firm processes trades and risk analytics on the public cloud, while keeping core banking platforms and customer data on-premises for security and latency reasons.

Implementation Considerations

Adopting a hybrid cloud model involves some key considerations:

• Security policies - Consistent identity, access, and compliance controls across environments. Unified security monitoring.
• Network integration - Seamless connectivity between private and public cloud resources. Transit routing architecture.
• Data integration - Unified data management plane. Automated replication and tiering of data.
• Management and monitoring - Centralized visibility into usage, performance, and uptime across all resources. Automation and orchestration.
• Skill sets - Cross-training IT teams on private, public, and hybrid cloud platforms. Learning new administration and automation tools.
• IT processes - Potential changes to provisioning, management, and operations procedures. Increased focus on automation and infrastructure-as-code.

The Path Forward

Hybrid cloud enables organizations to become more adaptable, drive innovation faster, and optimize IT spending. With the right strategy, hybrid cloud provides the best of all worlds - delivering the scale, flexibility, and time-to-market advantages of public cloud along with the security, performance, and control of private environments.

By adopting leading solutions to connect disparate environments, businesses can realize the full benefits of a hybrid cloud. With tight integration and unified data services across public, private, and on-premises infrastructure, companies gain an IT foundation for the future.