Practical Benefits Of A Hybrid Cloud Strategy

Hybrid cloud strategy

As more and more companies move to the cloud, one of the first questions they have to answer is which cloud model best fits their needs: public, private, or hybrid. Many are choosing the hybrid model as their best option.

The term “hybrid cloud” simply refers to an operational environment that includes both private and public cloud platforms. It has become an attractive model for many enterprises because it allows users to take advantage of the cost and functionality advantages of the public cloud, while also gaining the flexibility and control a private cloud provides.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the unique benefits of a hybrid cloud strategy.

Flexibility to Determine Optimal Placement of Workloads

With a hybrid cloud, administrators can decide where to place each workload to maximize efficiency and minimize costs.

The distinctive characteristic of the public cloud is its ability to provide IT services on demand without requiring up-front capital investments for hardware and infrastructure. With its XaaS (“Whatever you need”-as-a-Service) model, public cloud platforms, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud Platform (GCP), have become excellent vehicles for quickly deploying common applications that many companies depend on.

Whether it’s a CRM (customer relationship management) or ERM (enterprise resource management) application, or perhaps a document management environment such as Office 365, companies can institute such workloads on a public cloud platform quickly and cost-effectively.

Yet many organizations also have workloads that are better served in an on-premises environment than in the public cloud. For example, workloads that require very high levels of I/O responsiveness, such as big data analytics, may be affected by public cloud latency issues that could degrade system performance to unacceptable levels. By housing such workloads in a company’s on-premises private cloud, where storage and servers can be kept in close physical proximity to one another, latency effects can be minimized.

Control of Data and Applications

The public cloud is a multi-tenant environment in which resources are shared among a number of customers. Many companies, concerned about the possibility of their workloads somehow being affected by the activities of other users, prefer to keep their mission-critical applications at home in a private cloud, under their direct control, while offloading less critical workloads to the public cloud.

Data Placement to Meet Security Requirements

Data security keys

Data security is the number one reason for the use of private clouds. Although public cloud platforms can now provide very high levels of data protection, many organizations believe that their most sensitive data is less vulnerable when it is kept at home behind their own firewall. This is particularly true for companies in industries, such as healthcare or banking, that are subject to regulatory compliance mandates that specify how customer information must be kept secure.

On the other hand, less sensitive data that becomes inactive or infrequently used can be moved to public cloud storage to take advantage of lower costs and greater scalability.

Speed of Testing and Deploying New Applications

Many companies use both public and private clouds in the testing and deployment of new applications. The design parameters of new apps can be shaped, refined, and thoroughly tested using a public cloud PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) offering. Because PaaS resources are virtualized, developers can call them in as needed without having to spend capital funds to purchase hardware. Then, once development and testing are complete, the application can be deployed to a public or private cloud for production. 

Spillover of Non-Critical Data to the Public Cloud

keyboard in clouds

Many hybrid cloud implementations are specifically designed to allow seamless failover to the public cloud should the operations of an organization’s private cloud be disrupted for any reason. This is especially true in the area of data backup/restore and disaster recovery. Once the emergency has passed, operations can be returned to the private cloud environment, often without users ever being aware that the failure occurred.

This is also the idea behind “cloud bursting,” which is instituted when surges in demand outpace the capacity of a private cloud. Whether it’s pre-planned, perhaps in anticipation of seasonal spikes in traffic, or is the entirely unexpected result of some news event that suddenly drives increased traffic to a company’s website, non-sensitive data can be temporarily spilled over into the public cloud so that operations can continue without disruption.

The Zadara Hybrid Cloud Storage Solution

The Zadara Storage Cloud has proven to be a highly effective storage solution for hybrid cloud implementations. Zadara VPSA Storage Arrays are connected to major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP. They can also be housed on customer premises as the storage component of a private cloud. With their remote replication and mirroring capabilities, these devices can transparently transfer stored data between clouds to facilitate failover, spillover, backup/restore, and disaster recovery.

Zadara VPSA Storage Arrays are provided on a storage-as-a-service (STaaS) basis. No matter how many may be installed on site, customers pay only a monthly fee for just the amount of storage they actually use during the billing period.

If you’d like to explore how Zadara Storage can assist your company in developing a cost-effective hybrid cloud implementation, please download the ‘Zadara Storage Cloud’ whitepaper.

Zadara Team

Zadara Team

Since 2011, Zadara’s Edge Cloud Platform (ZCP) simplifies operational complexity through automated, end-to-end provisioning of compute, storage and network resources.

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