Key Considerations while Choosing Technologies for a Hybrid Cloud model

Cloud based applications have exploded over the past few years. Collaboration services, mobile apps, customer relationship management systems and document storage offerings have literally changed the lives of consumers and employees at companies, big and small. People are accessing their enterprise data from a smart phone on a plane at 30,000 feet; they are watching the latest episode of "Kaun Banega Crorepati" on a train from Mumbai-Delhi on their iPad. This all sounds very good and glorious but at the same time it is getting increasingly frustrating as well.

People are accessing their data from the plane but it is agonizingly slow, the connection drops 10 times and eventually it is taking longer to access the information that we are looking for. You get increasingly frustrated as the episode keeps buffering and eventually you give up and move back to reading your good old book. The cloud is useless if it is not enabling us to do our work faster and in a more secure, reliable manner.

From the enterprise point of view, most companies would think twice before putting up their sensitive data onto a public cloud. The public cloud does save the company a huge chunk of money but also raises concerns about security. They would prefer to put up their sensitive data on their own private servers and this kind of thinking prompted companies to setup cloud computing like processes in-house which gave rise to the "private cloud". These work very much like the cloud but they are stonewalled from the internet making them more secure and gives better performance to the companies as well.

In a nutshell, the cloud will be fast, secure and reliable but today it is not, until that time we have the "Hybrid Cloud".

Hybrid cloud very simply put is a composition of two or more clouds (private, public) which are essentially unique but are bound together to provide benefits of both the deployment models. The definition from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is: "a hybrid cloud is a combination of public and private clouds bound together by either standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability." It could be a combination of a private cloud inside an organization with one or more public cloud providers or a private cloud hosted on third-party premises with one or more public cloud providers.

Varied use cases of Hybrid cloud services exist. For eg: An organization could store its private sensitive data in house but then would interconnect that data to an application which is being offered in the public cloud as a software service. This allows the organization to deliver specific business services through addition of publicly available cloud services. Another example could be where applications run in a private cloud but then "bursts" to the public cloud when the demand for computing increases. This deployment model is called "Cloud bursting". The advantage in this model is that the enterprise only pays for extra resources when needed. The hybrid cloud architecture allows business to obtain degrees of fault tolerance combined with locally immediate usability without dependency on internet connectivity.

Many businesses today use a judicious mix of these clouds, in order to gain the maximum advantage from the good aspects of each of these clouds. While they use public clouds for less sensitive tasks, they prefer to use private clouds for their most vital processing tasks. The hybrid cloud, thus works out the most preferred infrastructure for companies who are not willing to enter the cloud in a big way.

Advantages of the Hybrid Cloud:

Hybrid clouds offer the cost and scale benefits of public clouds while also offering the security and control of private clouds. Here are some of the big advantages:

One of the major benefits is reduced costs. Every enterprise runs various kinds of processes, some work on critical data and some of them are regular day-to-day activities. Enterprises can decide to run the regular processes on the public cloud and the critical ones on the private cloud.

Hybrid clouds can be operated at any time at all, from any part of the world. This gives them a global reach for businesses that want to spread their reach beyond geographic boundaries. Also, this infrastructure provides fairly reliable connectivity, even in case of outages.

The use of public clouds removes the need for investments to buy any kind of new specific hardware for temporary projects or an unexpected need for additional resources (cloudbursting)

Helps optimize the infrastructure spending during different stages of the application development lifecycle. Public clouds can be tapped for development and testing while private clouds can be used for production.

Provides drastic improvements in the overall organizational agility, because of the ability to leverage public clouds, leading to increased opportunities unavailable earlier in traditional infrastructure or pure private clouds.

Concerns with the Hybrid Cloud:

As a hybrid cloud extends the IT perimeter outside the organizational boundaries, it increases the probability of attacks with a section of the hybrid cloud infrastructure under the control of the service provider.

The fear of insecurity of the cloud is one major aspect that discourages companies from adopting this infrastructure.

A hybrid cloud makes the data flow from a private environment to a public cloud much easier. There are privacy and integrity concerns associated with such data movement because the privacy controls in the public cloud environment vary significantly from the private clouds.

Conclusion

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 in-house and public cloud providers, some additional infrastructure security considerations come into the picture, which are normally associated with public clouds. Any businesses planning to deploy hybrid clouds should understand the different security needs and follow the industry best practices to mitigate any risks. Once secure, a hybrid cloud environment can help businesses transition more applications into public clouds, providing additional cost savings.