What is a Hybrid Cloud?

Cloud computing comes in three forms: public, private, and hybrid. To help you better understand the hybrid cloud, let’s define public and private cloud first.

Public cloud is a cloud computing model where services and infrastructure are provided off-site over the Internet. Private cloud is a cloud computing model where services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network.

Hybrid cloud is a combination of both public and private cloud services. For example, a company might run an application primarily on a private cloud, but rely on a public cloud to accommodate spikes in usage.

You might be a business owner who wants the best of both environments. The hybrid cloud offers the financial savings and flexibility of the public cloud with the security of a private cloud. This is an appealing solution for many small to mid-sized businesses.

Adopting this type of solution allows smaller companies to take advantage of the cost effective public cloud for their non-sensitive procedures, while their more sensitive data is stored safely on a private cloud configuration.

There have been many discussions and blogs written about which model is the best for this type of business or that type of business. Recently it appears the trend is moving more and more towards the hybrid cloud.

“The hybrid cloud will likely trump both private and public cloud models moving forward. It only makes sense. Different business functions require different tools, and it would be silly to give every department in the company the same set of tools to complete drastically different tasks,” said Michael Brown on MSPmentor.

Kurt Marko on InformationWeek.com would agree. “Hybrid clouds are the future of enterprise computing. Forty-seven percent of the nearly 400 respondents to InformationWeek’s new Hybrid Cloud Survey have implemented or are actively piloting or developing private clouds, with an additional 33% considering. The majority of that 47% have or are developing hybrid systems, in which workloads can shuttle to public cloud services like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM SoftLayer, or Microsoft Azure.”

The hybrid cloud has its benefits but it also has its drawbacks. According to Marko, hybrid clouds are more difficult to design and integrate.

The advantages of hybrid clouds:

• convenience – can be operated at any time from anywhere
• cost effective – very reasonable rates
• security – store the most sensitive information on local servers (private cloud network) and export other data to the cloud (public cloud)

For more information on hybrid clouds or to get your business computing services in the cloud, contact Cloudspace USA today!