The hybrid cloud became popular with more companies and organizations looking to integrate cloud computing into their IT infrastructure. This article examines whether the hybrid cloud is the right choice by reviewing its advantages and disadvantages and explaining why an organization chooses this setup. You will also receive practical advice to overcome some of the hybrid cloud implementation’s main challenges.
In a hybrid setup, the two cloud types are public and private clouds. The public cloud provides computer resources and services to users via a public Internet connection and shares infrastructure.
Customers provide their own computing environment in a private cloud. Private cloud environments can be hosted on-site or off-site, but only one client can access them via the private connection.
Pros and Cons of Hybrid Cloud
Pros
Better ongoing disaster recovery: If you go “all – in” on a cloud type, you’re at the mercy of that particular environment. In these cases, recovering from cloud infrastructure failures and business continuity may be harder. If you build your own private cloud and it fails, how do you get back without any backups? If you rely completely on public cloud services, what if your vendor fails?
By definition, you don’t rely on a single cloud environment to fulfill the hybrid cloud’s critical IT functions. Moreover, the public cloud’s pay-per-use model makes the failure to reach a secondary location much more accessible than ever during a break-up. Research shows the hybrid cloud model improves disaster recovery for 56% of organizations.
Cost savings: Any organization that wants control with its own private cloud, faces a dilemma when it comes to specific workloads that its existing infrastructure can not handle. Take an organization for a large data analysis project. Capital cost for additional servers and storage to support a Hadoop cluster quickly becomes prohibitive.
With the hybrid cloud, businesses can maintain control of their mission-critical applications and private cloud storage while using the tremendous scalability of public cloud infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of specific computationally intensive Big Data Analytics projects.
Unique control, performance and scalability balance: you control essential data and apps and the required performance level from the private cloud to increase your workload and, if necessary, additional scalability. The world’s best hybrid cloud.
Cons
Security complexities: While cloud suppliers do their best to safeguard their environments, your business is ultimately responsible for hybrid cloud security. A hybrid cloud model’s nature introduces other security complexities, such as identifying hidden vulnerabilities between the two cloud types and ensuring consistent user authentication and access through public and private clouds.
Possible bottleneck: A bottleneck is available when data is transferred from private to public clouds. Moving companies to the public cloud via the public internet could be too slow to meet IT needs. This slowdown can quickly become unsustainable as it affects performance in mission-critical functions or applications.
Lack of visibility: cloud visibility is harder to maintain in a hybrid cloud implementation. Non-visualization can cause cost-problems as organizations leave idle cases or use improper cloud storage options.
The lack of visibility may also affect regulatory compliance, as data movements between the internal system and the external system, and organizations may not be sure that their public supplier complies with essential rules.
Some of a hybrid cloud model’s best practices are:
- Encrypting cloud data.
- Instead of leaving it to your cloud vendors, take security responsibility.
- Establish and document policies on the appropriateness of each cloud type to specific applications, data, and workloads, taking into account performance, regulatory requirements, and function importance.
- Incorporate automation where possible, for example, using auto-scaling predictive solutions.
- Make sure you have a cloud expert or hire one to help implement it smoothly.
- Find public service providers that directly connect your on-site infrastructure to their systems.
