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Identifying Roadblocks in Embracing Hybrid Clouds

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Dhaval Gupta
New Update

Cloud computing, the long-debated dream of computing as a utility has the ability to transform a large part of the IT industry; making software even more interesting as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with pioneering ideas for new internet services no longer require large capital expense in hardware to position their service or the human expense to operate it.

Cloud adoptpublive-imageion is finally becoming mainstream. Over the past few months, the nature of the discussions has been shifting from theoretical, to architectural, and now to every operational challenge. The economic benefits offered by public clouds are attractive enough for many organizations to push some of their non-critical workloads to such services while also using private clouds for their mission critical needs.

Understanding the Hybrid Cloud

In its simplistic definition, a hybrid cloud is a combination of both public and private clouds. Such hybrid clouds deployments have proven to be advantageous not just in terms of better economics but also in terms of business agility. The best-of-both-worlds approach of hybrid clouds lets organizations take advantage of public clouds to reduce capital expenditure while still keeping their mission-critical workloads inside the organization. The figures stack up too - according to industry analyst Gartner, 2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.

According to the recent survey conducted by Trend Micro, for companies that have public cloud or hybrid applications currently in production, 45% of the existing applications are already deployed in the cloud and an average of 53% of new applications will be deployed in the cloud. However, by combining private and public cloud models, hybrid clouds have the largest attack surface. Businesses must set up security systems across both the private and public cloud elements. It is essential to comprehend the business benefits of hybrid cloud computing, the security factors, and how one can mitigate the risks involved with the use of public clouds along with a private cloud.

Challenges to expect

One of the biggest issues facing Hybrid Cloud users is data custody. Nowhere is this more prominent than in the different Cloud models. Public Cloud is a real worry, as the site where data is stored cannot be assured unlike private Cloud where one can assure that data is located and stored here. This leads to potential agreement and data protection issues, no need to mention the augmented exposure to security breaches. With a public Cloud model, organizations are effectively paying a third party to take away the infrastructure annoyance. But this advancement to data management can leave companies doubtful about where it is being stored and how secure it is. As per Gartner's reports, many countries have rules that may not allow the storage of sensitive or personal data in foreign countries. Even if they allow it, they may inflict additional security constraints on companies that choose to board data offshore.

Availability of a Service: Organizations worry about whether Utility Computing services will have adequate accessibility, and this makes some cautious of Cloud Computing. Ironically, current SaaS products have set a high standard in this context. Just as large Internet service providers use multiple network providers so that failure by a single company will not take them off the air, we believe the only probable solution to very high availability is multiple Cloud Computing providers. Although the company has numeral datacenters in different geographical regions using diverse network providers, it can have similar software infrastructure and accounting systems, or the company may even go out of business. Customers will be unenthusiastic to drift to Cloud Computing without a business continuity strategy for such situations. We believe the best possible way for free software stacks is for them to be provided by other companies, as it has been tricky for one company to defend creating and maintain two stacks of software dependability.

Data Lock-In: Software stacks have enhanced inter-operability among platforms, but the APIs for Hybrid Cloud Computing itself are still more or less proprietary, or at least have not been the subject of active consistency. Thus, customers cannot easily extract out their data and programs from one site to run on another. Concerns about the difficulty of extracting data from the cloud are inhibiting some companies from adopting Hybrid Cloud Computing. Customer lock-in may be eye-catching to Cloud Computing providers, but Cloud Computing users are susceptible to price increases, to dependability problems, or even to providers going out of business. The apparent solution is to normalize the APIs so that a SaaS developer could deploy services and data across Hybrid Cloud Computing providers so that the collapsing of a single company would not take all copies of customer data with it. The observable fear is that this would lead to a "race-to-the-bottom" of cloud pricing and ?atten the pro?ts of Cloud Computing providers.

Data Transfer Bottlenecks: Applications continue to become more data-intensive. If it is understood applications may be "pulled apart" across the boundaries of the clouds, this may confuse data placement and transport. Hybrid cloud users and cloud providers have to think about the insinuation of placement and traffic at every level of the system if they want to minimize costs.

Conclusion

However, hybrid clouds offer the cost and scale benefits of public clouds while also offering the security and control of private clouds. Apart from being cost effective, it also offers both the controls available in a private cloud deployment along with the ability to rapidly scale using public clouds. Hybrid clouds offer a greater flexibility to businesses while offering choice in terms of keeping control and security. Hybrid clouds are usually deployed by organizations willing to push part of their workloads to public clouds either for cloud-bursting purposes or for projects requiring faster implementation. Because hybrid clouds vary based on company needs and structure of implementation, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Since hybrid environments involve both on-premise and public cloud providers, some additional infrastructure security considerations come into the picture, which are normally associated with public clouds. Once secure, a hybrid cloud environment can help businesses transition more applications into public clouds, providing additional cost savings.

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