What Is Hybrid Cloud?

By Sarala Vanga On Mar 19, 2021

Modern businesses need fast and consistent networking solutions that can quickly adapt to complex work processes. This has never been clearer in the wake of COVID-19 when organizations are painfully aware of the costs of not scale quickly. Implementing new technology solutions whenever possible can help keep your business at the forefront of security at networking. You’ve heard of cloud computing before, but what do you know about hybrid cloud technology?

Here’s a quick guide on what it is, how it works, and how to decide if your business can benefit from marrying public and private cloud services to create a completely customized hybrid cloud infrastructure to meet your organization’s specific needs.

Holden Watne with GenIX in Los Angeles shares insights into the world of Hybrid Clouds. Discover more about GenIX here.

What Is Hybrid Cloud?

A hybrid cloud is a technology solution that integrates a private cloud network with other public cloud services, using specific software to facilitate communication between the various services. Hybrid cloud gives companies more control over their personal, secure, and proprietary data. It allows your business to scale in-house infrastructure and use public cloud services to handle overflow, all without needing to give third-party access to your company’s critical data. Your organization can use a tailored network of public and private cloud services to store, secure, analyze, and manage this data easier and cheaper than if you did the same in-house.

How Does Hybrid Cloud Work?

Hybrid clouds allow data to flow seamlessly and securely between both private and public cloud services. Data virtualization makes interconnectivity between services possible, and tasks are executed through applications like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and Wide Area Networks (WAN). All of these solutions are combined into a single cloud interface, allowing for more control over the safety and security of your crucial data, ensuring the privacy of your clients or customers, and providing access only to the team members who need it.

Companies utilizing different cloud technology solutions can also use a cloud agnostic platform for greater flexibility. If your team starts to run out of storage, the public cloud solution ensures automatic scaling, so your business continues to operate seamlessly. Using the platform also means that you have more capacity to run several workloads and different applications in a wide variety of cloud services, including private, public, and hybrid cloud.

Cloud agnostic deployment allows you to quickly switch to any cloud provider without causing any major operational disruptions and maintaining high productivity levels.

Evaluating Hybrid Cloud Technology

Before migrating your business to hybrid cloud technology, it’s crucial to weigh the benefits and drawbacks to determine if it’s the right choice for your company. The tools you use for data storage, security, and more are critical to your operations, and your decisions regarding them should always be informed. Here are some of the benefits and drawbacks of hybrid cloud technology to consider.

Benefits

You can use private and public clouds to ensure your business has access to diverse networking, computing, and storage solutions. With this, you get the most out of your storage, simplify moving workloads, and offer easier information clustering and orchestration options. In addition, cloud management platforms can help administrators streamline cloud storage management.
Hybrid cloud tech can provide solutions as needed instead of operating in an always-on capacity.
“Cloud bursting” in hybrid clouds configures private and public clouds to handle scalability needs better and avoid service interruptions.
Hybrid cloud tech can provide all-in-one solutions that don’t require multiple functionality add-ons, saving your company time and money.
Hybrid cloud computing provides businesses with crucial data control and improves security by minimizing the potential of data exposure. Enterprises or organizations can select where to house their workloads and data in compliance with policy and security requirements.

Drawbacks

Using a hybrid cloud adds another layer of complexity to your networking, including making it more challenging to deploy consistent user authentication and obtain access to protocols across different sites.
Big data used in hybrid clouds are susceptible to bottlenecks. However, this can often be quickly resolved by ensuring good foundational infrastructure.

When Should Businesses Use Hybrid Cloud?

You may want to consider migrating to the hybrid cloud if you are a business that:

Processes large amounts of data. Running analytics on large sets of data is something few organizations have the internal infrastructure to handle. In the hybrid cloud, you can utilize several different integrated tools to operate machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, virtual modeling, and other data-intensive tasks.

Largely relies on seasonal sales. If your company primarily offers seasonal products and services, the significant fluctuations in data between busier and slower times require good scalability. Outside the cloud, this can be easy to do and requires you to have in-house capabilities to handle your maximum business volume throughout the year. Hybrid cloud technology allows you to scale up or down as needed.

Is bound by HIPAA guidelines. If your business works with the Private Health Information (PHI) of others, you’ll need to keep certain types of data in your private cloud. However, by utilizing the public cloud for non-HIPAA-protected workflows, you can gain flexibility without sacrificing security.

How did Will Hybrid Cloud continue to Grow?

Gartner predicted a significant shift to hybrid cloud infrastructures across the globe in 2017 and estimated that 90% of companies would have adopted some form of cloud computing by 2020. This has already occurred, particularly with the security and data computation needs of businesses worldwide changing rapidly at the start of 2020 due to COVID-19.

As businesses continue to look for solutions that give them the option to scale up or down with as little impact on business operations as possible, the tech will likely keep growing. COVID-19 lockdowns taught many businesses the hard way the importance of scalability and remote access capabilities, and it’s unlikely these lessons will be forgotten anytime soon. Hybrid cloud solutions give companies peace of mind that their business can continue to operate at some capacity no matter what happens.

How Your Organization Can Make the Most of Hybrid Cloud

Many enterprises, especially those shifting to remote and hybrid work set-ups, utilize hybrid cloud when they automate repetitive tasks and simple and complex business processes. This service’s storage, security, and operational benefits are outstanding, attracting many other companies to adopt the same.

For some companies, it may be considered a significant investment. You may be in the same situation and ask how do you make the most of your hybrid cloud.

Your business can maximize the benefits of using the hybrid cloud by:

Clearly define which workflows will use public cloud tools and which will use private tools.
Creating company policies that provide teams with guidelines on how tools will be utilized within the company, how these guidelines will be enforced, and what potential consequences team members may face if they are in violation
Using a tool that integrates the management of public and private cloud services into a single user-friendly dashboard
Working with an experienced IT managed services provider who can assist you with the creation of a customized infrastructure tailored to the unique needs of your business

The most important thing you can do is capture and analyze data about how your cloud network is being used to implement strategies to cut down on poor performance and put more resources into techniques and tools working well for your company.

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