The Top 5 Advantages of the Hybrid Cloud

Tips for Ensuring Microservices Security within Your Applications

Cloud computing has become one of the prime opportunities worth exploring. Some businesses are rapidly progressing within the Cloud, while others continue to remain skeptical of the Cloud’s true capabilities. The Cloud is marketed as a tool to enhance efficiency, flexibility, and even provide the opportunity for expansion. However, these benefits are devoid of tangibility, which makes the transition to the cloud challenging to validate. Organizations are on the lookout for a change which can incorporate a mix of a public and private cloud, which is often referred to as a cloud hybrid.

Advantages a company can gain by investing in a hybrid cloud model for their business:

1) Business Continuity
Business continuity is one of the integral elements of an organization’s operations. A business’ continuity plan is not limited to backing up data into the cloud only; nor is it a disaster management plan. Business continuity is all about continuing to do business during a failure or even a disaster. In situations wherein an emergency does occur, data management procedures won’t be affected, and everything will continue to remain the way it was before the disaster occurred. A business continuity plan needs to be planned carefully, by taking into consideration elements related to resilience, recovery, and contingency. For this very purpose, a hybrid cloud can prove to be extremely beneficial. All the necessary data can be backed up and stored within a hybrid cloud, so that there is no data loss, even in the case of a disaster or emergency; this minimalizes downtime and the costs related with the recovery of essential data.

2) Innovation Opportunities
Innovation can be implemented in a straightforward, subtle manner within a cloud environment, only because it does not require a lot of expenditure for modeling a new service. Before the entry of the cloud, the costs associated with such tasks included massive capital investments in setting up the infrastructure, labor, and research time incurred in maintenance. These procedures place a lot of pressure on the available resources, especially on capacity management practices, which in turn make uncertain forecasting factors. In a hybrid cloud, various concepts can be tested within the cloud, and a prototype can be tested and devised without incurring any extra expenditure. The cloud provides all the necessary resources which include data, network, and the infrastructure.

3) Scalability
A hybrid cloud environment can go a long way in helping improve scalability as it provides an excellent opportunity to businesses to migrate specific operations to the cloud. By implementing automation rules within the cloud, a company can scale its resources up and down as business needs change. This way, a business can use the hybrid cloud and take advantage of its unlimited resources, while optimizing performance and efficiency.

4) Risk management
A hybrid cloud environment is an excellent opportunity for companies to test their capabilities concerning workloads and in turn plan their cloud strategy selectively. The cloud structure can be relatively complex at times, which needs elaborate planning, data security, and other risk management policies to ensure everything is taken care of, before making a move to the cloud.

5) Secure Systems
There is a common saying that security takes a hit within the public clouds; this is relatively true, as data is not kept in a private space across private systems. In the public cloud, everything is accessed via the Internet. In a secluded, hybrid cloud, there is much more flexibility within the design and the architecture along with a higher level of security than the public cloud systems.

The hybrid cloud has emerged as one of the preferred systems in the technological gamut; it has a series of benefits to businesses; however, what matters are the demand and the supply along with the circumstances in which a company seeks to use the hybrid cloud. Since the hybrid cloud is a complex structure, there is hardly one situation which will fit all requirements. For this very reason, the multiple benefits offered by a hybrid cloud help fit into all the possibilities, making it an excellent resource for businesses and large organizations alike.

Also Read

Top Tips for Ensuring Microservices Security within Your Applications
Artificial Intelligence is Changing the Information Technology Sector
The Top 5 Cloud Computing Trends to Watch for in 2019

Hybrid Cloud: Defining The Face of Futuristic Cloud Architecture

Hybrid Cloud: Defining The Face of Futuristic Cloud Architecture
The future of cloud computing is a matter of hot debate. While some persist in one direction celebrating a unified and hybrid cloud, others have different prospects in mind altogether. Ever-changing cloud technology is rearranging its shape; the forces of business that guide cloud infrastructure have defined new dimensions for cloud technology as a whole.

In the recent years, a trend has evolved in which a more cautious approach is taken on the part of companies; they falsely assume that the cloud is profoundly metered and, therefore, become more judicious about what they move to the cloud. Indeed, they are unaware of the technological advancements that cloud has undergone or will undergo shortly.

One of the most remarkable advancements that have unfolded new dimensions for cloud migration is hybrid technology – a new kind of cloud computing environment that makes use of an amalgamation of on-premises, private cloud, and third-party, public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms. Hybrid technology allows workloads to move between private and public clouds based on current computing needs and changes in cost, thereby, renders the enterprises greater flexibility and varied data deployment options.

The Hybrid Architecture
• The Hybrid cloud operates upon three primary components of modern-day cloud computing, namely:
• A public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
• The construction of a private cloud, either on-premises or through a hosted private cloud provider.
• Adequate wide-area network (WAN) connectivity between two environments.

In the hybrid cloud, with use of these three prerequisites, an enterprise can choose a public cloud (which is essential to access compute instances), storage resources, or other services, such as big data analytics clusters or serverless compute capabilities. Enterprises have to architect their private clouds to achieve compatibility with the desired public cloud(s), which involves the implementation of suitable hardware within the data center; this includes servers, storage, a local area network (LAN) and load balancers.

As a next step, the enterprise must deploy a virtualization layer, or a hypervisor, to create and support virtual machines (VMs) and, in some cases, containers. Then, IT teams must install a private cloud software layer, such as OpenStack, on top of the hypervisor to deliver cloud capabilities, such as self-service, automation and orchestration, reliability and resilience, and billing and chargeback. A private cloud architect typically generates a menu of local services, such as compute instances or database instances, which users can choose according to their need.

Selecting hypervisor and cloud software layers that are compatible with the desired public cloud and ensuring proper interoperability with the public cloud’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and services are the critical steps in creating a successful hybrid cloud; this also enhances the migration process between private and public clouds. A creative developer can create advanced applications by mixing the components of various services and resources across the public and private platforms.

Hybrid Cloud Benefits
Apart from flexibility, many other benefits result from the deployment of a hybrid cloud. For example, it enables an enterprise to deploy an on-premises private cloud to host sensitive or critical workloads and use a third-party public cloud provider to host less-critical resources, such as test and development workloads; this keeps security concerns intact while following the business protocols that are most effective.

Manages Fluctuating Workloads
A Hybrid cloud is also the perfect partner of fluctuating workloads; it is valuable for the workloads that are dynamic or highly changeable. For example, businesses that witness seasonal ups and downs in sales, therefore fluctuation in data, may benefit. These businesses can expand their cloud capacity by employing third-party public cloud for less confidential data in sync with their private cloud. The applications run on the private cloud but can use cloud bursting in a situation of extended computing demands through accessing additional computing resources from a public cloud.

Handling Big Data
Suppose in an unexpected situation; an enterprise has to expand its cloud capacity. That enterprise can access a third party public cloud for the sudden need and let go of the space when the need is no more – this saves big bucks for the firm. Additionally, if the firm has the requirement of extended cloud space for a long run, the hybrid cloud seems to be a better choice than a fully committed private area due to its flexibility, affordability, and ease of opting out.

The Mix of IT Services
Hybrid cloud also enables an enterprise to mix IT services and manage them in various combinations; this results in the creative use of cloud space and far better efficiency.

Also Read

Cloud Computing in the Healthcare Industry
Four Key Steps That Can Enhance and Endure Cloud Migration
How Cloud Migration will help Boost Security and Compliance
True Business Efficiency Combines the Power of Cloud Computing and DevOps Practices