What Is Hybrid Cloud?

The digital transformation is moving steadily to occupy all aspects of life. People become dependent on technology to work, study, socialize, entertainment, online banking, or for shopping, to name only a few. This rapid acceleration of technology has shifted the world into what is now known as the information age.

Nowadays, organizations of all types and across all industries are utilizing digital solutions to streamline work operations. Cloud adoption is considered the most noticeable movement towards digital transformation.

Since the start of the COVID19 pandemic, governments worldwide imposed long lockdown periods to stop the disease. To remain operational, enterprises had to adopt the work-from-home model. The workforce's massive shift to become remote has accelerated digital transformation by several years in just a few months. The ninth annual Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report highlighting the latest cloud computing trends found 93 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy, and 87 percent have a hybrid cloud strategy. Gartner, on the other hand, expected a massive increase in cloud spending. For instance, it predicates that the worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is projected to grow 18.4% in 2021 to a total of $304.9 billion. Cloud is expected to reach 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024.

This article will define the hyper cloud term and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of adopting each of its components.

What is a hybrid cloud?

A hybrid cloud computing model is when an organization leverages a private cloud with one or more managed public cloud vendors to run its IT infrastructure. Proprietary software is used to facilitate integration between these components.

For example, a typical hyper cloud deployment consists of the following three components:

1. On-premises infrastructure, such as local data centers.
2. A private cloud.
3. A managed public cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure.

There are numerous benefits from adopting the hyper cloud model in organizations. For instance, the hyper cloud has unified management to handle all entities comprising its environment, unlike multi cloud, where administrators must manage each component separately. On the other hand, a hybrid cloud is more flexible and gives organizations more control over their sensitive data. For example, an organization can store its sensitive data on local data centers or its private cloud while leveraging the public provider's power and capacity to scale its services on-demand. The most significant benefit of the hyper cloud is that it facilitates agility in business. Hence, it allows an organization to change direction quickly and choose the best combination of public, private cloud, and on-premises resources to achieve its business objectives with minimal cost.

In the following lines, we will discuss each component's advantages and disadvantages that constitute the hyper cloud environment.

Public cloud – Advantages and Disadvantages

When an organization uses a service offered from an external cloud provider such as Google Cloud, AWS, or MS Azure, it uses a public cloud provider. The following advantages can be achieved when working with this model.

• Flexibility: The ability to scale up and down on demand according to current business needs. For example, suppose a business is expecting more traffic at holidays to its online portal. It can request more bandwidth to be added during peak time.
• Reduce IT spending: There is no need to purchase the entire IT infrastructure equipment.
• More reliable: Public providers distribute their data centers and servers across wide geographic areas; this eliminates sudden downtime and ensures service reliability.

Disadvantages of public cloud

• Reduce data security: You will not know where your data is stored and who can access it.
• Increased costs: As you scale your business, the cost of service may increase significantly.

Private Cloud - Advantages and Disadvantages

When a company has its cloud infrastructure, this is called a private cloud. An organization can host its private cloud on-premises or off-premises and hire a third-party provider to manage it. Advantages of the private cloud model:

• Increased security: You have complete control over your sensitive data and can set whatever you want (access controls) to protect it.
• Customization: you can customize your infrastructure according to your business goals and objectives.

Disadvantages of private cloud

• Increased IT spending costs as you need to purchase the IT equipment.
• Increased responsibility as you need to maintain the IT infrastructure, keep its data secure and remain compliant with various data protection rules such as the HIPAA and GDPR.
• Less flexible when scaling the business up or down.

Summary

Many organizations want to leverage cloud benefits without migrating all their data and operations to public cloud providers. A hybrid cloud model allows organizations to take benefits from the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud while utilizing private cloud and existing IT infrastructure to host and process sensitive data.