Situations that Demand a Hybrid Cloud Architecture

Defining What Hybrid Cloud Is

A hybrid cloud computing environment is a mixture of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud, and public cloud/virtual private cloud environments with orchestration utilized to connect the platforms as seamlessly as possible. Orchestrated interconnectivity is the mainstay of hybrid cloud, it’s how workloads are shared and shifted, management is consolidated, and processes coordinated. According to a 2021 Flexera report “eighty four percent [of enterprises] are taking a hybrid approach, combining the use of public and private clouds.”

 What are the Situations that Demand Hybrid Cloud?

Data performs best and provides the greatest value when it is put in an environment that optimizes its usage, delivery, and safe keeping. Usage and delivery are governed by various requirements including storage, connectivity, security and cost. Multiple applications and processes can use the same data but may require different access, parsing, and administration. Hybrid cloud matches the performance, storage, and security requirements of the application and workload to the appropriate cloud and infrastructure type while maintaining a single management entity.  Here are the situations that benefit most from hybrid cloud:

• Compliance and Data Privacy: Today a significant percentage of global business is governed by compliance regulation. In financial services alone, the world’s primary markets spend $181 Billion maintaining financial compliance. Compliance, sovereignty, and security requirements for data and records access, storage, and transport are specified as regulations in a wide group of governing bodies including PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOX and others. A properly architected hybrid cloud solution assures your data and records have a commensurate level of compliant cloud infrastructure while offering optimal business economics for the processing and storage of data that doesn’t have compliance requirements.
• Accommodating Business Agility: Growth of any business today typically results in the expanded use of core applications and extending the use of those same applications to increase business agility and embrace new markets. The extension or expansion of the legacy data center is the most expensive and least dynamic option for this expansion. The hybrid cloud represents the best opportunity for scaling of legacy applications, the infrastructure required to support the applications and the data they produce. If proper attention is paid to the specific performance needs of the application, e.g simple cloud migration or rewriting software to cloud native, hybrid cloud is the best choice for application transformation/migration and a secure, compliant and economically viable engine for business growth.
• The Costs of Big Data: Handling a business’s ever-growing volumes of data is a science fraught with the potential for dramatically increased response times and bad economics. When you add requirements for new data analysis tools, AI, etc to the big data solution, then choosing the right cloud type for each workload becomes key to both the transactional and financial futures of the business.

The designs and decisions you make for hybrid cloud architectures, security and economics are complex issues. Whether you are researching or executing a hybrid cloud strategy, Otava can help. Visit our cloud page to learn more, and reach out to us to discuss which cloud environment is best for your business.

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 3 Key Benefits of Hybrid Cloud: According to the 2019 State of the Cloud report, 94 percent of organizations surveyed are using cloud, and 28 percent prioritize hybrid cloud.

Is Hybrid Cloud Right for Your Business? Hybrid cloud represents an ideal approach to capitalize on the scalability of public and private cloud, combined with the control of on-premises hardware, for an increasing number of organizations exploring the future of their network architecture.

Achieving Compliance in a Hybrid Cloud: According to the 2019 Flexera State of the Cloud report, the number of enterprises with a hybrid cloud strategy (one that combines both public and private clouds) grew to 58 percent for 2019, up from 51 percent in 2018. While the growing trend is exciting, it can create some anxiety around how to maintain compliance across the environment.