What You Need to Know About Hybrid Cloud Computing

A hybrid cloud is a mixed computing environment that allows applications to run with the support of computing, storage, and services in multiple environments, including public and private clouds, on-site data centers, and even "edge" locations. Hybrid cloud computing continues to gain momentum, since the number of organizations relying entirely on a single public cloud is now dwindling rapidly.

In a hybrid cloud environment, organizations have the flexibility to run certain services or store data on their own servers (on-premises or in a private cloud) while also leveraging the resources and scalability of the public cloud, says Mayank Jindal, an Amazon software development engineer in an email interview. The approach allows organizations to meet specific security, compliance, or performance requirements, as well as providing the ability to seamlessly move workloads between different environments based on their evolving needs.

Key Benefits to a Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud allows adopters to optimize and tailor their infrastructure/resources for business needs, performance, cost, security, and governance, explains Alok Shankar, engineering manager and technical lead for Oracle Cloud Migrations via email. "It also allows adoption at a pace that is comfortable for an organization."

Related:Enterprise Guide to Hybrid Cloud Adoption and Management

Shankar notes that an organization may start their hybrid cloud journey quite modestly by replacing disk storage with object storage and slowly migrate other components as needed. "Usually, applications needing high security or low latency can be kept on-premise while others needing elasticity or rapid scaling can be migrated to the public cloud."

A hybrid cloud's flexibility can be extremely useful, Shankar says. "In most cases, there are cost and ROI implications that can save millions of dollars," he states. If an organization migrates components to the cloud, it can save the expense of adding extra machines to its data center, which may be needed only temporarily. "Cloud elasticity is on-demand, cheaper, and you only pay for what you use when compared to on-premise solutions." …

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