Hybrid Cloud - What Is A Hybrid Cloud And What Is All The Fuss About?

The beginning of the year is traditionally the cue for web authors to start firing out future prediction articles left right and centre - this year was no different. While reading through the myriad of 'Cloud computing in 2013' articles the thing that struck me the most was the continual mention of Hybrid Clouds.

A recent study showed that a high proportion of the population either didn't know what cloud computing was or admitted feigning knowledge on the subject at work.

With this statistic in mind, the purpose of this article is to clearly explain what a hybrid cloud is.

A Hybrid can be defined as 'a thing made by combining two different elements' and a hybrid cloud is no different. Put simply, a Hybrid is a cloud computing environment that consists of at least one private cloud element and public cloud element. Typical hybrid clouds see private clouds confined within the enterprise data centre with the public aspect being offered by cloud service providers such as SoundCloud or Amazon.

Hybrid Clouds have a number of benefits but the most commonly stated one is the ability to make use of the scalability and cost effectiveness that the cloud offers without compromising or exposing critical information. In Lehman's terms this means - the ability to have scalable computer resource without having to store sensitive information in a public environment or having to transmit the data over a public connection.

There are of course other benefits as well.

Private Clouds can be expensive to create and configure - in regards to both monetary cost and time cost. Hybrid clouds can help to ease this as they do not usually require a complete overhaul of existing IT infrastructure. The reason for this is that hybrid clouds also make use of public clouds so while you go about creating any changes to your IT infrastructure you already have access to public cloud in order to minimalize disruption.

As briefly mentioned earlier, there are notable security benefits when using a hybrid cloud over a purely public cloud as they allow an enterprise to keep all their sensitive resources safe and sound outside of the public cloud while you can still use the public cloud for archived, non-sensitive or non-pertinent data. Data movement between public and private clods is also a great deal easier than from a traditional server based environment. For some industries migration to public cloud is not an option due to industry regulations. In these situations a Hybrid Cloud really is the only option and provides the best of both worlds.

As with anything, there are also a couple of disadvantages to consider

Hybrid clouds are often seen as the more expensive option in regards to cloud computing options. This is due to having to maintain both private and public services.

Hybrid clouds are also seen as the most complex formation (in a purely IT sense) which can put some businesses (especially small ones) off them.

To conclude, A Hybrid is definitely an interesting option to consider in regards to computing, it offers a unique balance of scalability and security and cost effectiveness that just isn't achievable through other methods.

Thanks for reading, until next time.