Public and Private Clouds Working Together – Benefits of Hybrid Cloud

I’ve been having quite a few conversations of late with customers looking into different cloud deployment models. In this blog, I thought I would share my thoughts around Hybrid Cloud explain some of the benefits, but also make readers aware of associated challenges.

Firstly, What is the difference between Multi-cloud and Hybrid cloud?

The Multi-cloud term still confuses a lot of people as there are many differences, the easiest way to explain the difference is; unlike Multi-cloud models, in which different clouds are used for different tasks, the components of a Hybrid cloud typically work together to achieve a solution. For example, you can use the public cloud for high-volume, lower-security needs such as web-based email, and the Private cloud (or other on-premise infrastructure) for sensitive, business-critical operations like customer sensitive data.

Benefits of Hybrid cloud:

 

The diagram above shows the advantages that moving to a Hybrid cloud model can provide. Let’s examine some of these in more detail:

Flexibility, this allows workloads to move around to accommodate sudden bursts of demand on your private cloud infrastructure.

Hybrid cloud provides risk management and enhanced security as you can keep your critical data and applications under your security rules and make them only accessible to your organisation’s technical personnel.

Finally, this type of cloud deployment enables optimal network speeds and low latency. Through Hybrid cloud you have the ability to architect your own network

So how do you build a Hybrid cloud?

One of the greatest benefits of adopting Hybrid cloud is that you can customise it to the needs of your organisation.

Even though there are multiple approaches and combinations for Hybrid, certain requirements must be followed:

  • IaaS
  • A private cloud, (on-premise or via hosted private cloud provider)
  • WAN connectivity between environments
  • Private clouds must be properly architected to attain compatibility with your Public cloud environment

With pre-requisites fulfilled, what’s next?

  • Do you have the right cloud management software?
  • Do you have the skillset needed?
  • If not, what training is required and how long will it take?

This leads me onto the challenges surrounding Hybrid cloud adoption:

  1. Integration complexity– What goes where? Understanding the patterns and tools required to move processes may be a challenge to even to the best cloud specialists. Also, the integration of legacy systems with cloud is a complex matter as well. Creating the infrastructure to manage this integration is challenging, due to the variety of applications and technologies involved.
  2. Cloud Management – There is little to no standardisation for management and configuration of cloud services across different providers. Understanding the constraints of each environment is crucial to efficient management and ensuring that resources are not wasted.
  3. Change and Scale complications – Every organisation will have a set limit for scalability that may need to be revised from time to time. Setting up a horizontally scalable infrastructure will help you mitigate these risks.
  4. Network Design – when you architect your network you need to account for various factors such as network bandwidth, management between public and private clouds, the impact of location on your network, the network requirements for each individual application, the security requirements of different types of data and numerous other factors.

The bottom line – Investing in cloud management software, a specialised workforce and training has proven to be a very expensive and long approach.

Utilising specialist cloud partners such as UKCloud can help with:

  • Addressing the skills gap, architectural challenges, such as the right connectivity for environments, what should be placed where and what technology is right for specific workloads.
  • Providing a highly secured platform which is subject to independent verification against a comprehensive set of globally recognised validations, accreditations and certifications.
  • Delivering managed services to help provide additional tooling such as, monitoring of environments to alert organisations of any possible faults before they become issues.

When we look at the benefits, they do look great. But then we stumble across challenges, that is when the majority of businesses decide not to move to hybrid. Having the right partner is crucial to help you to get from A to B.

Our Multi-cloud expertise makes us the go to partner for UK Public Sector workloads with experience dealing with multiple cloud deployment models including Hybrid cloud which combines on-premise infrastructure, or Private clouds with Public clouds.