Hybrid Cloud
Need help building a hybrid cloud solution? We offer public, private and hybrid cloud for businesses and large enterprise clients. We represent all major cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Rackspace and IBM Cloud. Call 877-708-8900 to speak with an expert.
Hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms. By allowing workloads to move between private and public clouds as computing needs and costs change, hybrid cloud gives businesses greater flexibility and more data deployment options.
Typically, an enterprise will choose a public cloud to access compute instances, storage resources or other services, such as big data analytics clusters or serverless compute capabilities.
However, an enterprise has no direct control over the architecture of a public cloud, so, for a hybrid cloud deployment, it must architect its private cloud to achieve compatibility with the desired public cloud or clouds. This involves the implementation of suitable hardware within the data center, including servers, storage, a local area network (LAN) and load balancers.
An enterprise must then deploy a virtualization layer, or a hypervisor, to create and support virtual machines (VMs) and, in some cases, containers. Then, IT teams must install a private cloud software layer, such as OpenStack, on top of the hypervisor to deliver cloud capabilities, such as self-service, automation and orchestration, reliability and resilience, and billing and chargeback. A private cloud architect will typically create a menu of local services, such as compute instances or database instances, from which users can choose.
Benefits of Hybrid Cloud
Business Continuity
Hybrid cloud solutions are often considered by organizations as a key component of a business continuity solution where critical data is replicated to a cloud solution in a different location to the primary systems. This provides data insurance in the event of a disaster (natural or technological), minimising downtime and the costs associated with such an event. Understanding this benefit, service providers have streamlined their offerings to easily integrate a business continuity solution into hybrid cloud systems.
Scalability
Scaling on IT infrastructure can be extremely expensive, inefficient and places much more pressure on accurate forecasting in growing companies. However, a hybrid cloud environment can provide the opportunity for businesses to scale out to a cloud environment for specific workloads. Implementing automation rules on the cloud provides the ability to scale resources up and down as business demands change. This allows the hybrid cloud system to take advantage of unlimited resources based on demand driven usage, optimising the environment for performance and efficiency.
Risk Management
Companies can leverage hybrid cloud as the first step in moving to a predominately cloud environment. A hybrid solution provides the perfect opportunity for companies to test the capability of certain workloads and providers in a cloud based environment and assist them in planning their cloud strategy. However planning is key, as hybrid cloud can require complex design to coherently combine an organisation’s platform with a cloud environment.
Improved Connectivity
When moving components of your business to the cloud there can be problems deriving from network performance that impact critical applications. This can be difficult to prevent, especially during peak traffic periods and is a result of irregular public internet performance. iseek’s Hybrid Cloud platform can mitigate this issue by leveraging iseek’s connectivity solutions to guarantee bandwidth between on premise and cloud locations, improving performance by reducing distance-based latency.
Security
There is an argument to be made that network security is compromised in public cloud environments. This can be expected as data is no longer kept entirely in a private location across private systems but rather accessed via the internet. However, a private hybrid cloud system allows much more control in design and architecture and a higher level of data security than public cloud solutions.