IT Innovators: Want to Know Where to Apply a Hybrid Cloud?

By now you’ve likely heard a host of reasons why the hybrid cloud is a good idea, but do you really know how to apply it, or even if it can or should be applied to your environment? Perhaps the best way to answer those questions is to take a closer look at some of the hybrid cloud’s more common use cases. If any sound familiar, or have applicability to your specific situation, then it might be well worth your while to start examining your options.

Use Case 1: Enabling Disaster Recovery

If you work in IT, you know it’s not a question of if disaster will strike, but when. Even so, you’re probably not fully prepared for such an event. A key reason why might just be that disaster preparedness is a costly and time consuming proposition; one that requires both extensive planning and expensive backup systems. Much like an insurance policy on your car though, it’s a necessary evil. You pay for it, but only really see a return on your investment if your car gets hit or stolen, or in this case, your data storage is comprised by a flood or some other natural disaster.

This is exactly the sort of scenario where the hybrid cloud approach shines. It provides business continuity for organizations by extending their on-premises resources into the public cloud. You gain access to virtual machine replication with flexible replication intervals, automated failover testing and storage that can adjust to your capacity requirements. Disaster recovery can be quickly initiated from virtually anywhere—assuming, of course, that there is an internet connection. Best of all, you pay for the disaster recovery only when you need it.

Use Case 2: Support For A Fast Growing Business

Suppose you are part of a fast growing business and need to find a way to deliver services to a new area, or perhaps you want to deploy web and e-commerce applications. The challenges here are numerous: securing your organization’s data, and that of your customers; ensuring your customers have a great user experience, and making sure you have the resources to quickly adapt to potentially unpredictable capacity requirements.

With a hybrid cloud infrastructure, you get access to a secure, easily scalable and cost-effective platform well suited for growing businesses. Plus, it allows you to leverage the power of datacenters all around the world.

Use Case 3: Support For Traffic Spikes

Let’s say that like most organizations, yours experiences periods of high traffic; perhaps during the holiday season or during a special once a year marketing campaign. You need to be able to support that demand, but it doesn’t make good business sense to maintain extra resources, and the cost that comes with it, just to accommodate an occasional traffic spike.

With a hybrid cloud approach, you can have a cloud provider on board and ready to step in with additional resources as you need them. If the traffic swings are something you see coming, you can move your workloads entirely to the cloud. This would allow you to quickly scale capacity as needed and just pay for the resources as you use them. You could also run your workloads primarily in your own datacenter and then just use infrastructure as a service to bolster your capacity when it’s needed.

Use Case 4: Filling The Gap From Your Legacy Systems

Suppose your organization has legacy systems that need to be upgraded, but doing so all at once is just not feasible. A hybrid cloud offers the ideal solution to fill the gap. Using it, your old systems can be hosted on-premises or in a private cloud, while your new ones can be moved to the public cloud.

In addition to the hybrid cloud use cases I just mentioned, there are a whole host of others you can check out in various resources on the web. Here are a few excellent ones that I recommend:

If you have any other hybrid use cases you want to recommend or are an enterprise with a hybrid cloud success story you want to share, drop me a line at [email protected]. In the meantime, don’t forget to check back here each week for more information on the hybrid cloud and other important IT-related topics.

This blog is sponsored by Microsoft.

Cheryl J. Ajluni is a freelance writer and editor based in California. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of Wireless Systems Design and served as the EDA/Advanced Technology editor for Electronic Design for over 10 years. She is also a published book author and patented engineer. Her work regularly appears in print and online publications. Contact her at [email protected] with your comments or story ideas.