What is hybrid cloud?
Hybrid cloud is the extension of a cloud solution. It combines one or more cloud services with another cloud service. Hybrid cloud strategies include elements from different cloud environments which are orchestrated to run in tandem on a single task.
All the cloud services and tools are bound together so that they can communicate and manage applications and workloads across environments. In this way, hybrid cloud offers a single pool of support to achieve modern IT strategies using multiple cloud architectures.
What does hybrid cloud do?
- Consolidates separate cloud entities.
- Enables scalability and provisioning.
- Allows movement of workloads between environments.
- Allows businesses to manage apps with a single, unified tool.
- Automates processes for orchestration.
- Enables more resilience.
Why do businesses choose hybrid cloud strategies?
Hybrid cloud allows businesses to gain the benefits of multiple cloud services – making it perfect for organisations with competing IT priorities. Hybrid strategies allow businesses to gain the benefits from both private and public cloud infrastructures.
Private vs Public
Private Cloud
On premises (on-prem) infrastructures allows businesses to have the most control over the management and security of their data. This is important if there are specific compliance rules that apply to data storage and security. For sensitive medical or payment data, for example, stricter rules may apply to where and how you store your data and run applications.
Public Cloud
With public cloud, the cloud provider manages and maintains the entire physical infrastructure, and the software platform. Public cloud solutions are rented and utilised to meet IT requirements without having to manage or maintain complex infrastructure. A key benefit of the public cloud is that it allows businesses to add and remove servers, workers, or instances in just a couple of clicks. The unparalleled flexibility and scalability benefits enable businesses to add servers quickly during busy periods and then scale down effortlessly.
The hybrid strategy
A hybrid cloud approach makes it possible for organisations to leverage the benefits of both public and private cloud. Businesses adhere to compliance or security needs by maintaining sensitive data on-prem, while running their web applications on the public cloud. The result of employing a hybrid cloud is better security and more flexibility.
Cloud bursting
Businesses might add servers on the public cloud temporarily to meet an increased demand during busy periods. This is known as ‘cloud bursting’.
Business continuity
A business might choose to use a hybrid cloud for business continuity or disaster recovery purposes. Critical data can be replicated between providers to mitigate outage.
Cost savings
Hybrid cloud environments generate cost savings. Only having to pay for public cloud resources when needed, saves businesses money, regardless of industry or sector. It removes the need to make upfront investments on resources that might rarely be used at full capacity.
Specific needs
By combining cloud providers and solutions, you’re able to choose the best from each and match the offers to your needs. No sacrifices necessary.
How does hybrid cloud work?
By combining public and private clouds, hybrid cloud allows data and workloads to move between different platforms and share data across workloads. With data, workloads, and networks virtualised, it’s possible to create a tunnel of communication between the services, so that platforms and workloads can operate in tandem. This seamless interconnectivity allows for unified management and the orchestration of processes. The better developed the connections are, the better your hybrid cloud works.
Modern hybrid cloud architecture
Today, IT teams build hybrid clouds by focusing on the portability of the apps that run in the environments. They develop and deploy apps as collections of small, independent, and loosely coupled services. By running the same OS in every IT environment, it’s possible to manage everything through a single platform.
Who should move towards a hybrid cloud model?
There are many good reasons to deploy hybrid cloud. Businesses who already have a private cloud infrastructure in place, for example, might want to interface with public cloud resources to gain the power of public cloud while keeping their sensitive data on private cloud.
Maybe your organisation has a lot of dynamic workloads, high volumes of data to process or a large variation of IT services. In this case, the IT setup will likely benefit from the flexibility or scalability of the hybrid model.
How secure is hybrid cloud?
With the right design, integration, and management, hybrid cloud can be as secure as an on-prem infrastructure. Hosting in multiple environments is one of the strongest defences against security risks as it removes a single point of contact in the event of an attack.
As discussed, hybrid cloud also reduces security risks by limiting the exposure of private or sensitive data to the public cloud.
What’s the difference between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud?
Unlike hybrid cloud, which connects multiple cloud services, a multi-cloud strategy is simply when you use two or more cloud providers for your workloads. There are many good reasons why a business might choose a multi-cloud strategy.
A business might, for example, want to replicate workloads on multiple clouds, or split workloads across multiple clouds. If a business has users spread across the globe, hosting with multiple providers can get their datacentre closest to each specific user base. By hosting closer to end users’ businesses reduces overall latency.
Multi-cloud setups can also increase availability. If one provider suffers outages, then there is always a duplicate setup running with another provider - minimising potential downtime.
Hybrid cloud and OVHcloud
It’s possible to connect your personal datacentres to OVHcloud as a true hybrid cloud infrastructure. With OVHcloud Connect, you can link to public cloud, private cloud and dedicated bare-metal servers. This is the perfect foundation from which to create your own sophisticated hybrid cloud architecture.
Extend your network to OVHcloud datacentres
Link your infrastructure to OVHcloud datacentres. A dedicated link to OVHcloud's fibre-optic network between our datacentres provides high availability across all our regions, for all your solutions. Your workloads and data are completely isolated from public internet access, and you can easily connect your security gateways.
Decide exactly what you keep on-premises
You retain full control of where your data is hosted, with the freedom to scale your infrastructure across your on-premises solutions and isolated spaces in OVHcloud datacentres. With our private network, you define all the security rules for the data you host at OVHcloud, and you don't need public internet access for running applications.
Scale your infrastructure for hybrid cloud
By interconnecting your current cloud providers, on-premises workloads, and OVHcloud services, you can effortlessly scale and achieve high availability for all your cloud solutions.