Hybrid Cloud

For several years, cloud computing has been the focus of IT decision makers in all corporates, but many security-conscious businesses have been hesitant to move data and workloads into the cloud.

Now, with the underlying technology behind cloud services available for deployment inside organisations, a new model of cloud computing is gaining a foothold in business: the hybrid cloud.

What is the Hybrid Cloud?

The new world of the hybrid cloud is an environment that employs both private and public cloud services. Companies are realising that they need many different types of cloud services in order to meet a variety of customer needs. The growing importance of hybrid cloud environments is transforming the entire computing industry as well as the way businesses are able to leverage technology to innovate. 

There are two primary deployment models of clouds: public and private. Most organisations will use a combination of private computing resources (data centres and private clouds) and public services, where some of the services existing in these environments overlap — this is the hybrid cloud environment.

The Public Cloud

The public cloud is a set of hardware, networking, storage, services, applications, and interfaces owned and operated by a third party, like us, for use by other companies or individuals. We can create a highly scalable data centre to meet all your requirements and more!

Public clouds are viable because they typically manage relatively repetitive or straightforward workloads. For example, electronic mail is a very simple application. Therefore, we can optimise the environment so that it is best suited to support a large number of customers, even if you save many messages.

We are able to offer optimised storage or computing services for your computing hardware and software to support these specific types of workloads. In contrast, the typical data centre supports so many different applications and so many different workloads that it cannot be optimised easily.

The Private Cloud

A private cloud is a set of hardware, networking, storage, services, applications, and interfaces owned and operated by an organisation for the use of its employees, partners, and customers. A private cloud can be created and managed by a third party, like us, this private cloud will be exclusive to your enterprise.

The private cloud is a highly controlled environment not open for public consumption. Thus, a private cloud sits behind a firewall. The private cloud is highly automated with a focus on governance, security, and compliance.

Automation replaces more manual processes of managing IT services to support customers. In this way, business rules and processes can be implemented inside software so that the environment becomes more predictable and manageable.

The Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud is a combination of a private cloud combined with the use of public cloud services where one or several touch points exist between the environments. The goal is to combine services and data from a variety of cloud models to create a unified, automated, and well-managed computing environment.

Combining public services with private clouds and the data centre as a hybrid is the new definition of corporate computing. Not all companies that use some public and some private cloud services have a hybrid cloud. Rather, a hybrid cloud is an environment where the private and public services are used together to create value.

Why does hybrid cloud matter?

In optimal deployments, hybrid cloud provides the best of both worlds of computing. A public cloud offers the ability to instantly provision computing resources on demand, without the extensive upfront costs and time needed to build on-premise solutions.

The private cloud component delivers information quickly, and does not rely on internet connectivity to operate. A private cloud component provides peace of mind; with an on-premise server, a disruption to internet connectivity will not bring your business to a complete standstill.

Cost is a substantial factor for many organisations. For industries with seasonal or variable workloads, assembling a private cloud to handle normal workloads while relying on a public cloud to handle burst workloads can be a budget-friendly IT strategy.

Any organisation that has a need to safeguard against potential loss of data, resulting from hardware failure, misplaced or stolen hardware, or natural disaster has a reasonable use case for a hybrid cloud deployment.

The benefits of going hybrid

With the hybrid cloud model, IT decision makers have more control over both the private and public components than using a standard public cloud platform.

Building a hybrid cloud with private infrastructure that's directly accessible -- in other words, not being pushed through the public internet -- greatly reduces access time and latency in comparison to public cloud services.

Another benefit of this hybrid cloud model is the ability to have on-premises infrastructure that can support the average workload for your business, while retaining the ability to leverage the public cloud for circumstances in which the workload exceeds the power of the private cloud component.

Building out the private end of a hybrid cloud also allows for flexibility in server designs. This gives us at VpsCity the flexibility to provision rapid and archival storage. Combined with the availability of a host of new SSDs and hard drives, data storage can be achieved with ease. 

Hybrid cloud can be an effective solution for businesses with a tight focus on security or unique physical presence demands. Although there's seemingly less risk in a hybrid cloud model, a connection to the public cloud does have data security implications. This, however, is true of almost any public network communication.

And while the upfront cost of server hardware for the private end of the hybrid cloud is high, the control that VpsCity can assist you to wield over hardware selection and system design for the private component offers an invaluable way of properly tailoring resources to the business's needs. Assembling a private cloud to handle a standard workload, with burst compute offloaded to the public cloud, can be a long-term budget-friendly arrangement.

Ultimately, hybrid cloud allows organisations to leverage public cloud services without offloading the entirety of their data. This provides a great deal of flexibility in computing tasks, while keeping vital components within the company firewall. 

Hybrid cloud computing is a “best of all possible worlds” platform, delivering all the benefits of cloud computing - flexibility, scalability and cost efficiencies - with the lowest possible risk of data exposure.

Take a closer look at the VpsCity Hybrid Cloud solution by examining our case study clients: Carpet Court New Zealand and Total Access. We were able to provide these clients with the ultimate customised solutions to expertly fit their enterprise requirements. We were to able to derive significant cost efficiencies and provide enhanced services which has created a platform for achieving high performance for both our successful clients.

A cloud is hybrid

·      When a company leverages a number of SaaS (Software as a Service) applications and moves data between private or data centre resources.

·      When a business process is designed as a service so that it can connect with environments as though they were a single environment.