Top 5 benefits of hybrid cloud
Organizations are migrating workloads to the public cloud, as well as implementing private clouds in-house. As these forms of clouds computing take hold, large and small businesses are focused on hybrid cloud to bridge the two models.
A hybrid cloudconnects public and private clouds to create a single environment that offers consistency and mobility for the workloads that run on it. An enterprise can then get the best of both worlds and avoid unwanted tradeoffs, such as having to migrate traditional VM workloads to cloud instances or developing cloud-native applications tied to a specific provider’s services.
Even though there’s considerable investment and effort involved, there are five main benefits of hybrid cloud that make it worthwhile for enterprises.
A business must be prudent about the workloads and services that run in its private cloud. A private cloud is deployed on data center infrastructure that the enterprise controls and operates and that requires a significant investment of capital, equipment and talent to deploy and maintain. Although a private cloud can parse and provision local resources in a cloud-like manner, the private cloud infrastructure is still finite. An enterprise can mitigate costs with a connection between their private cloud and a public cloud. The connection helps smooth spikes in demand, drawing upon public cloud resources when local demand stresses capacity. Similarly, the public cloud suits temporary, experimental or general-purpose workloads the company does not want to source, set up and manage in-house. It can use its finite private cloud resources for mission-critical workloads — or simply run workloads where the costs are lowest. The cost benefits of hybrid cloud also include clarity on where the money goes. A hybrid cloud can make it easy to divide IT consumption into capital and operational costs. Enterprises can use tools to monitor cloud usage, getting detailed reports on utilization — and the cost of cloud services — by department and workload. Hybrid cloud provides the best of both worlds.
Agility is a core premise of cloud computing. A private cloud brings some provisioning and scaling agility to the enterprise, but the amount of available resources in a physical data center is still limited. In contrast, the public cloud enables users to immediately deploy compute and storage instances, as well as related services, without constraints on resources. However, moving a local workload to the public cloud often demands at least some migration prep work. Consistency is one of the main benefits of hybrid cloud. It becomes easier to create, shift and scale workloads and resources if the private cloud offers instance types and services that are similar to the chosen public cloud. This type of consistency enables enterprises to provision and use private cloud resources when it’s appropriate and cost-effective, then easily draw upon resources from the public cloud when necessary.
