5 Key Applications of Hybrid Cloud

Every organization would have data it doesn’t want going out of its premise, and yet doesn’t want to invest in additional IT infrastructure. Hybrid cloud makes perfect sense in such a case. Here are five such use cases.

Hybrid cloud is increasingly becoming popular among organizations because the concept allows one to run an on-premise private cloud or IT infrastructure in orchestration with various public cloud services. You get similar subscription based payment terms as public cloud, similar pay per use or per seat and scale as you go, similar unlimited storage, flexibility, affordability, and faster deployment.

Here are five key applications that hybrid clouds are being used for today:

Backup and Data archiving: Organizations generate lots of data, most of which is never accessed after first time. Yet, it continues to consume precious data center resources like storage after that, just so that the organization can recover it if (God forbid) disaster strikes. This is where you could use remote storage with a cloud service provider. It will lower cost of data storage and ensure business continuity.

Run a dev/test environment: This could be more cost-effective to run on the cloud than on-premise. Once testing is done, you could migrate it to your local network, or vice versa. You will, however, have to ensure that the cloud service provider’s infrastructure is compatible with your own.

Run customer facing apps on the cloud: A small e-commerce company that has just begun its journey could use a hosted private cloud of a data center service provider, and leverage the same service provider’s public cloud infrastructure during peak demands. This way, the company can have best of both worlds. If the company succeeds, it could easily pay for the additional infrastructure, else it doesn’t have any capital investments to worry about.

Extend your data center: Instead of adding more equipment to your data center, you could use a cloud service provider’s virtual private network as an extension. This way, you won’t have to purchase additional equipment, and yet have a flexible, scalable, and secure extension to your infrastructure in the cloud.

Business Intelligence in the cloud: BI typically requires a lot of computing power, wherein you could have your data reside on-premise, but leverage the compute capability from the cloud.

There could be many other uses of hybrid cloud, but these are the most popular ones. They address one key concern most companies have about moving to the cloud—data security. A hybrid cloud makes sense as their business critical info remains on premise while the cloud is used for non-critical load, additional compute power, etc.

Everything comes with its own set of challenges, and so does hybrid cloud. You’ll have the challenge of managing two infrastructures—on-premise and cloud. You'll get increased network complexity to manage, etc. Data sovereignty could also become an issue if the cloud service provider doesn’t guarantee where your data will be once you move it to the cloud. Get this sorted out with your cloud service provider beforehand. The cost of data management itself could also be high, depending upon the volume being moved. Data security risks could arise if the conduit for the data transfer is not secured.

Hybrid cloud, therefore, makes sense for every organization. It’s a logical way forward in the cloud computing space, as it brings the best of both worlds to an organization.

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