Hybrid Cloud Definition

What is Hybrid Cloud?

Cloud customers have a few different options for cloud infrastructure models. Public cloud infrastructure is hosted by a third party and provides advantages such as flexibility and scalability. Private cloud, on the other hand, is hosted within an organization’s own data center, which provides additional privacy.

Hybrid cloud deployments mix public and private cloud infrastructure. This design allows the organization to take advantage of the benefits of each type of cloud infrastructure.

How Hybrid Clouds Work

Hybrid cloud combines a couple of different cloud environments:

• Public Cloud: A public cloud is a cloud environment maintained by a cloud service provider. Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are all examples of public clouds.
• Private Cloud: A private cloud implements cloud functionality within an organization’s own infrastructure. This could be on-prem or in a privately owned data center.

Hybrid cloud interconnects these two environments, allowing data and applications to move between them. This enables an organization to optimize its cloud infrastructure to meet its needs and adapt to changing business requirements.

Advantages of Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud is an increasingly popular cloud service model. Some of the advantages that it can provide to an organization include:

• Flexibility: Hybrid cloud enables data and applications to move between public and private clouds as needed. This allows an organization to restructure its cloud infrastructure or add more public cloud resources as needed.
• Cost Effectiveness: Public cloud environments are hosted on shared infrastructure, which takes advantage of economies of scale. The ability to move data or applications to the public cloud offers potential cost savings to an organization.
• Security: Private clouds are more configurable and secure than public ones since they are fully owned and managed by the organization. A hybrid cloud enables applications and data with greater security requirements to be hosted on the private cloud part of an organization’s infrastructure.
• Scalability: Public clouds allow an organization to deploy additional resources as needed. In a hybrid cloud environment, this allows an organization’s cloud infrastructure to rapidly scale to meet demand.

Hybrid Cloud Challenges

While hybrid clouds are a popular option for cloud computing, they also have their challenges. Some common issues that companies have with hybrid clouds include:

• Complexity: Hybrid clouds distribute data and applications across multiple sites owned by different organizations. This can make it difficult to design and implement these environments to work effectively.
• Performance: In a hybrid cloud environment, applications hosted in public and private clouds may need to work together. The time to retrieve data or run an application grows if cross-cloud communication is required.
• Security and Compliance: Hybrid clouds place some of an organization’s data and applications in the public cloud and link them to the private cloud. This creates challenges with ensuring that an organization’s systems and data are secure and compliant with applicable regulations.

Conclusion

Hybrid clouds link public and private cloud infrastructure together into a single, integrated cloud environment. This provides numerous benefits to an organization by allowing it to take advantage of each environment’s strong points. However, these environments can also be complex and difficult to manage and secure.