What is a Hybrid Cloud?

Essentially a hybrid cloud is similar to the description of the word hybrid itself; it’s a little bit of everything, the best of both worlds. By definition a hybrid cloud is composed of a private cloud and a public cloud. When within a hybrid cloud, the user may use all the services offered by the public cloud as well as the unique services provided by the private cloud. It’s a more customer centric approach where a cloud host can generalise some services as public and provide others at a different pricing model.

Why use a Hybrid Cloud?

• Clear Definition of Boundaries: Some existing infrastructure services such as storage have to be kept public; but when it comes to business intelligence the processing of the actual data can be done on a private cloud. There is no overlap of process flow and is a much more practical approach when it comes to utilisation of hardware.
• Infrastructure Compatibility: When large corporations with multiple departments running various platforms need to merge, a hybrid cloud implementation sounds promising. In this model resources can easily be matched and moved around till a satisfactory result is obtained. Cross platform functionality is no more an issue with a hybrid cloud approach.
• Role Based Restriction: Not all information needs to be public. Knowledge and businesses which are on a need to know basis can stay that way in the Hybrid Cloud. Assigning permissions for access in specific areas is much easier and hassle free.

The Gamble

Hybrid clouds can be a boon for most cloud service providers. The entire process of assigning and merging a variety of resources and having a unique billing is a very promising choice but flexibility may cause an issue. Not many cloud hosting services have implemented hybrid clouds, but they hold the key to an efficient cloud system. No more is it ‘going cloud’, it’s more like ‘when are you going hybrid cloud’?

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