Hybrid Cloud Definition
Hybrid-cloud A hybrid cloud architecture is mix of on-premises, private, and public cloud services with orchestration between the cloud platforms. Hybrid cloud management involves unique entities that are managed as one across all environments.
What is Public vs. Private vs. Hybrid Cloud?
Innovations in the cloud have resulted in a move from single-user private clouds to multi-tenant public clouds and hybrid clouds. This evolution in cloud infrastructure has seen an increase in the use of hybrid cloud solutions. The cloud types have the following differences:
• Private Cloud: Serves a single-user. It can be self-hosted or hosted by a cloud provider.
• Public Cloud: These represent infrastructure-as-a-service offerings purchased from Amazon, Google, IBM or Microsoft.
• Hybrid Cloud: Hybrid cloud architecture combines two different types of infrastructure into a single heterogeneous environment. It can be any combination of a traditional data center, private cloud, and public cloud. Even though these environments remain different, they can work together effectively and function as one environment.
What are Some Hybrid Cloud Examples?
Hybrid cloud architecture works well for the following industries:
• Finance: Financial firms are able to significantly reduce their space requirements in a hybrid cloud architecture when trade orders are placed on a private cloud and trade analytics live on a public cloud.
• Healthcare: When hospitals send patient data to insurance providers, hybrid cloud computing ensures HIPAA compliance.
• Legal: Hybrid cloud security allows encrypted data to live off-site in a public cloud while connected o a law firm’s private cloud. This protects original documents from threat of theft or loss by natural disaster.
• Retail: Hybrid cloud computing helps companies process resource-intensive sales data and analytics.
What is Hybrid Cloud Strategy?
Tech professionals use hybrid cloud strategy in the following ways, according to a 451 Research report:
• Dynamically move workloads to the most appropriate IT environment based on cost, performance and security.
• Utilize on-premises resources for existing workloads, and use public or hosted clouds for new workloads.
• Run internal business systems and data on premises while customer-facing systems run on infrastructure as a service (iaaS), public or hosted clouds.
Increasingly, a hybrid cloud model is called a hybrid cloud environment. This environment strategy involves running applications in different environments with multiple public and private cloud vendors, while each element lives in one hybrid domain.
Why use Hybrid Cloud?
Hybrid cloud architecture allows an enterprise to move data and applications between private and public environments based on business and compliance requirements.
For example, customer data can live in a private environment. But heavy processing can be sent to the public cloud without ever having customer data leave the private environment. Hybrid cloud computing allows instant transfer of information between environments, allowing enterprises to experience the benefits of both environments.
Hybrid cloud benefits include the following management tools:
• Choice: The additional choice of multiple environments provides flexibility and the ability
to avoid vendor lock-in.
• Disaster Avoidance: Multiple environments ensures compute resources are always available to avoid downtime due to natural disaster or human error.
• Compliance: Many hybrid cloud environments can help enterprises achieve their goals for governance, risk management and compliance regulations.
How does The VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Help with Hybrid Cloud Deployments?
With enterprises running their applications in a mix of private data centers and multiple public cloud environments, choices for application services are increasingly driven by technologies that can be infrastructure agnostic and those that have uniform architecture and user experience irrespective of the environment.
For more on the actual implementation of load balancing, security applications and web application firewalls check out our Application Delivery How-To Videos.
For more information on hybrid cloud deployments see the following resource: