By IT Brew Staff
less than 3 min read
Definition:
Hybrid clouds combine private clouds (such as those hosted by an organization onsite) with public clouds (such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud), allowing IT professionals to manage data and resources across flexible and unified IT infrastructure.
In theory, hybrid clouds offer organizations and IT professionals the best of both worlds: All the security and control of a private cloud with the scalability and features of a public cloud. For companies in tightly regulated industries such as finance or healthcare, a hybrid cloud is an enticing option for storing and moving data in a regulation-compliant way while also enjoying the public cloud’s massive resources. A hybrid cloud can spare an IT team from having to overprovision its on-premises hardware or build out a private cloud that’s too complex and sprawling.
However, implementing a hybrid cloud can prove quite complex, even for experienced IT teams. Before building out this infrastructure, teams must carefully plot out their networking, virtualization, and containerization needs, as well as the management platform that will allow all of this to run effectively. For example, if you’re an IT pro tasked with building a hybrid cloud for a financial institution, you need to consider which applications and processes will run on the private cloud (such as those with highly sensitive data) and which will rely on a public cloud (including customer-facing web pages and more).
Once a hybrid cloud is up and running, IT pros must continue to make hard decisions, including which data to process and applications to run on which type of cloud and how to back up and recover data stored in hybrid infrastructure. For those IT pros who succeed at a hybrid cloud deployment, however, the potential benefits to the organization in flexibility and security are significant.
