Owing to the remote working model, courtesy – COVID – 19, we all have read or heard a lot about hybrid cloud infrastructure.
What is Hybrid Cloud?
A hybrid cloud environment incorporates workload portability, orchestration, and management across two or more computing environments—usually, a mixture of a private (on-premise) cloud and a public cloud. Hybrid cloud enables enterprises with additional flexibility and data deployment options.
What is multi Cloud?
‘Multi-cloud’ simply means multiple public clouds. In a multi-cloud infrastructure, an enterprise uses multiple clouds from different cloud providers. They use different cloud vendors for hosting their applications, network, and storage.
Multi-cloud deployments have a number of use-cases. It could be the deployment of multiple IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) vendors, PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) vendors, or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) providers. This enables enterprises to utilize expertise of different cloud service providers.
How hybrid cloud is different from multi-cloud?
Often confused for each other, these two cloud environments differ from each other significantly. Hybrid cloud involves the integration of two or more different types of cloud infrastructure – be it a private cloud, an on-premises data center, or both with at least one public cloud. However, in a multi-cloud environment, individual clouds are not integrated with each other since enterprises use different clouds for different workloads.
What is a hybrid cloud network?
A hybrid cloud network is a network that enables data transfers between on-premises IT resources, private clouds, and public clouds. Hybrid cloud computing supports the movement of workloads across these environments and is connected by telecommunication and cloud services and the infrastructure that supports those connections.
What are the benefits of hybrid cloud infrastructure?
Agility – This is the primary benefit of hybrid cloud networking. Considering the unprecedented changes that this pandemic brought along, organizations had to quickly move to a remote working model which required enhanced network and storage capabilities. In this scenario, a hybrid cloud model allows organizations to increase their speed to market by optimizing IT performance and providing the agility needed to meet changing business demands. Enterprises with hybrid cloud infrastructure are not limited to one specific type of cloud environment. Hence, they can easily expand their workload as and when the need arises, and rapidly test, prototype, and launch new products.
Security – A hybrid cloud environment gives businesses greater control over their data. When enterprises are faced with higher computing demands, a hybrid cloud environment allows them to quickly move their critical workloads from on-premise infrastructure to a public cloud without giving third-party access to sensitive data. Enterprises can protect their business-critical applications and data with more comprehensive security measures, while still using the flexible computing and network power of the public cloud for less sensitive tasks and information.
Cost Effective – Cost is a key factor for many organizations while considering cloud infrastructures. A hybrid cloud is a great option for companies that want more security and control of their data while looking at a cost-effective way to scale their operations to meet the surge in demand. Since hybrid cloud includes amalgamation of different types of cloud environments – an organization can keep its highly sensitive data and applications on-premise, while migrating the operational and less sensitive data to the public cloud without incurring the additional capital expenditure.
Better Returns – With more granular control over resources, a hybrid cloud environment enables IT teams to optimize the spends across on-premise, private and public clouds. It also empowers organizations to modernize applications faster, and connect cloud services to data on the cloud or on-premises infrastructure in ways that deliver new value.
In conclusion, hybrid cloud infrastructure enables enterprises to reap the benefits of both worlds – public and private cloud. Unless an organization is completely certain about the kind of infrastructure that would work for their operations and budget, they shouldn’t limit their capabilities and efficiency by opting for a specific type of cloud environment.
