The Advantages of Hybrid Cloud Computing
Hybrid cloud computing has become a convenient and practicable model of cloud computing for many companies all around the world. It integrates public and private clouds which allow data and applications to move between them.
There are several key factors behind hybrid cloud adoption.
With hybrid clouds, organizations can keep their sensitive or mission-critical data and applications on their private clouds to ensure security and control while at the same time relying on scalable public cloud services for some aspects like storage, disaster recovery, or web applications. Additional public cloud resources are needed only when organizations pay for them.
Another benefit of a hybrid approach is that it helps avoid vendor lock-in that can result from reliance on a single public cloud provider only. On the other hand, if one vendor experiences problems or increases cost dramatically, the private cloud remains unaffected because it serves as a good backup plan for business continuity. Any single vendor does not limit organizations by adopting a hybrid approach.
Also, going hybrid could be less challenging for large corporations with significant internal infrastructure invested in private clouds. Instead of eliminating their previous investments in private clouds, they could extend these capabilities to include those offered by public clouds over time through this controlled process known as Hybridization, representing the middle ground for organizations gradually transitioning to cloud services.
hybrid cloud also offers significant savings. An organization can optimize its infrastructure and computing costs by retaining sensitive regulated or customized workloads in private clouds while utilizing low-cost public cloud services as appropriate. Infrequently accessed data could be archived on the public cloud storage instead, thanks to overflow flexibility into these infrastructures, so private clouds would not have to be bought too much because public clouds may be needed.
Regarding security, hybrid clouds are good for financial services, healthcare, and others concerned with regulatory compliance because they enable keeping the most sensitive data in a private cloud behind an organization’s firewall. In this case, less sensitive workloads and data can be put in the public clouds to access them easily.
For many global, regional, or specialized organizations, hybrid cloud facilitates localization requirements. Thus, any data governed by laws specific to the given geographic locations could remain on the local private clouds while benefiting from economies of scale through global public cloud platforms as enabled by a hybrid approach.
Similarly, hybrid models help large distributed corporations like consumer goods manufacturers, hotel chains, and big box retailers to allow local autonomy over resources. As a result, head offices can issue worldwide instructions and safety regulations via their secured private clouds; whereas local branches and shops can access shared public clouds, maintaining data flexibility. It can be facilitated using public cloud platforms to deploy apps-facing customer and website content. It works with data lakes and private cloud databases at their back end but has yet to be found online.
Summary
By using both environments, companies are able to balance workloads and not be dependent on a particular vendor which in its turn leads to digital transformation processes and cost-cutting. Beyond the hype surrounding hybrid cloud solutions as they mature, more organizations are adopting them because they seem the next logical step in cloud adoption.