All about Hybrid Clouds

A hybrid cloud is one which is a combination of both public and private cloud. It is a cloud computing environment in which an organization offers and manages some resources in-house and has others that are provided externally. The service providers can utilize the 3rd party Cloud Providers in a full or partial manner thereby increasing the flexibility of computing. A hybrid cloud is usually offered in one of two ways; by a vendor that has a private cloud and forms a joint venture with a public cloud provider and the other case where a public cloud supplier forms a partnership with a vendor that offers private cloud platforms.

This model takes advantage of the less expensive public cloud while insuring that highly sensitive information is protected. The hybrid cloud is a great way for businesses to save space and money for businesses. This is the main reason for the large scale usage of hybrid cloud technology, as businesses today have too much information to store on their own servers, but they are not willing to take risk regarding security issues that come with public cloud. So, using the hybrid cloud offers them the opportunity to consider gain of an internal network of storage, as nicely as a public cloud that can be accessed from any spot with net access, while the data is being safeguarded.

Under many circumstances, the hybrid approach permits a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud tenders with no revealing mission-critical applications and data to intermediary vulnerabilities. This type of hybrid cloud is also known as the hybrid IT.

There are three criteria driving the implementation of hybrid IT which are:
• An organization’s need to maintain and control the data.
• The cost efficiency of cloud mechanism such as software-as-a-service and storage-as-a-service
• The desire for an IT section to react as swiftly as possible to rapidly altering business needs.

The hybrid cloud is one of the ideas of cloud computing. It is a dream of picture perfect inters- operability between the private cloud in data center and resources dumped away in one or more public clouds. A greatly promoted work in progress, the hybrid cloud undertakes such vibrant new use cases as “cloud bursting” /”follow the sun” /”follow the moon” computing.

Some of the important aspects of hybrid cloud include compatibility and consistency across private and public clouds. It means that it is able to create assets like virtual equipment, provisioning outlines, mechanization scripts all in one place and use them in another. It also overlays to coordinate the use of private cloud and public cloud resources. One can run an application Web tier in the public cloud for simpler and more flexible scalability. While doing so, one has to keep the back-end database in the private data center.

The hybrid model blends and maximizes the best of a multi-tenant cloud with physical and virtual systems with dedicated environment. Using this, it would be possible to cross-connect existing back-end resources like databases and other supporting applications to the cloud, resulting in greater flexibility.
The hybrid clouds also provide a good foundation for other purposes beyond on-demand scalability, such as disaster recovery. This means that the private cloud is using a public cloud as an on-demand failover platform, to be turned on when needed. This is a very cost effective idea. They also provide application compatibility which means, for a certain applications public clouds could be highly suited, while some other applications might not be suited for the public cloud. Thus having a hybrid approach is very apt in such cases.

However, there are a few challenges with the Hybrid Cloud model, those being:
• The connectivity issues between the in-house data center and the external cloud
• Overheads with respect to Network & Systems monitoring and management can be potentially high, as it continuously needs to be monitored and optimized on both the sides.
• Depending on the estimated workload volumes and peak workloads, Data traffic volume limitations may affect the operation of the system, in cases where a shared leased line is used,
• One another single point of failure increasing the risks in a hybrid cloud model is Network disruptions, but if you go for redundancies, your cost also increases.

Though we encounter some challenges, the Hybrid cloud computing model can still provide significant advantages to (large) organizations.

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