The current digital age is marked by our reliance on the cloud. Every company today is confronted with a variety of cloud choices and options. The debate regarding which cloud is better - private or public, is probably as old as virtualization. This is when a hybrid solution comes into the game as it combines the best characteristics of both options.
The hybrid cloud market is estimated at $129 billion in 2023 and may increase to $348 billion by 2028. The growing demand is clear – cloud services increase the efficiency of IT infrastructure at a reasonable price. This article will discuss the implications of the hybrid cloud and why more and more entrepreneurs prefer to use this model for their businesses.
What Is a Hybrid Cloud?
A hybrid cloud is a model of IT infrastructure construction that combines the resources of different cloud environments. It allows consumers to use public and private cloud solutions in beneficial combinations.
The hybrid infrastructure works as a single system and provides convenient management of all cloud services. You can independently choose which resources to use in isolation, and between which systems data exchange should take place. Communication between cloud services can be done in different ways: using a virtual private network (VPN), local area network (LAN), application programming interface (API), wide area network (WAN), etc.
Advantages of Hybrid Clouds
- Flexibility Companies can adjust the limits of public and private cloud solutions according to the needs of their businesses. Thus, the hybrid model allows you to move workloads between environments to optimize business processes and quickly change the amount of IT resources following current tasks. This guarantees the convenience of infrastructure management.
- Cost reduction The hybrid model allows it to save on the maintenance of its own local data centers by making maximum use of cloud services, the support of which is the responsibility of the provider. This will improve the profitability of business investments because you will be able to expand your IT capabilities without significant costs for "hardware.”
- Security and fault tolerance Due to the flexible placement of data in several IT environments, the risk of data loss is significantly reduced. A well-thought-out distribution of the load increases the reliability and stability of the infrastructure. In addition, cloud services are not accessible to physical attacks and have built-in protection services against various types of cyber threats.
What Tasks Are Hybrid Clouds Suitable For?
Hybrid clouds are a universal solution for different types of companies: from startups that cannot afford a large data center of their own to corporations seeking to scale.
Why are they so universal? Because they solve a wide range of problems:
- Digital transformation Businesses are turning to flexible public clouds to improve their IT infrastructure. However, as was already mentioned above, the company may have certain products that must be left on a private site. In this case, the hybrid model will gradually modernize the infrastructure, ensuring the integration of new solutions with traditional ones.
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Keeping confidential data Personal information of customers of financial, banking, medical, and other institutions that work with sensitive data should be placed in an isolated private cloud for security reasons. However, it is not always convenient for the company to store all data on such a platform.
Therefore, the best option is a hybrid model: sensitive data is in a private cloud, and the rest is in a public cloud. This is what KPMG Norway does - a company that provides audit, tax, and consulting services. It works with confidential customer data, which, according to the terms of contracts and European regulations, cannot be stored in a public cloud. Therefore, KPMG uses hybrid cloud software and places sensitive data in a private cloud.
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Project testing If a company develops new products, they need to be tested on an isolated private site. In such a way the new product will not interfere with the work of the main services. What is more, after testing is completed, it is important to quickly transfer projects to the main public environment, where their capacities can be increased. This speeds up product prototyping and time-to-market processes.
For example, the developers of the above-mentioned company KPMG Norway were limited in testing applications due to data confidentiality — they could not test them in the public cloud. But thanks to one the hybrid software that they chose, developers got more freedom, because they were able to deploy projects in a private cloud.
- Rapid infrastructure scaling With the flexibility of cloud services, it is possible to use exactly as many resources as you need in a specific period without restrictions. For example, quickly scale your resources during the holidays, during peak seasons, or the release of new products.
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Optimizing the operation of IoT devices Thanks to the hybrid infrastructure, it is possible to increase the performance of IoT devices - to locally process the data collected by "smart" devices, reducing the delay of information transmission. And store processed data — on powerful overcast clouds.
To sum it up, hybrid clouds are an opportunity to increase the productivity, security, and flexibility of your business without unreasonable costs.