Hybrid Cloud Use Cases, Challenges, and Platforms Explaine

What are the hybrid cloud use cases?

Prior to putting in place a hybrid cloud infrastructure, evaluate a number of hybrid cloud use cases and their benefits, drawbacks, and solutions to ascertain whether this architecture meets the business and IT requirements of the organisation. Some of the more typical hybrid cloud use cases to assess are as follows:

Digital transformation

Businesses frequently wish to use public clouds to update their IT infrastructure, but they may be prevented from completely closing a private data centre due to old applications or compliance issues. Businesses with a variety of data and application types can move some of their IT infrastructure to the cloud and keep some apps on-site with hybrid cloud computing.

Migration of applications

Hybrid cloud facilitate the selection of the optimal cloud environment based on the type of workload, offer safe and tested landing zones, and enhance code update maintenance. Older apps, however, might not make suitable migration candidates.

Testing and development

Because there is no need to buy and install actual hardware on-premises, developing and testing apps on the public cloud is quicker and less expensive. Public cloud platforms and other cloud services, such storage, are frequently used by software developers to host development projects.

Cloud burst

When additional capacity is required, hybrid cloud offer flexibility for workloads, particularly in use cases such as data processing, media processing, seasonal retail bursting, and unpredictable burst workloads. But in order to prevent latency when transferring data, cloud bursting needs to be done carefully.

Distributed data processing

Hybrid cloud environments improve processing times, lower latency, and give access to data and apps stored both on and off site when workloads are dispersed over multiple sites without requiring a large local infrastructure.
However, without encryption and access controls, it might be difficult to maintain consistency among dispersed data sets.

Backup and disaster recovery

Organisations can backup data in the cloud and replicate workloads on-premises with the aid of a hybrid cloud. Workloads transfer to the cloud environment and function correctly using on-demand cloud resources in the event of a data centre disruption. Hybrid cloud backup issues must be avoided with careful installation.

AI and machine learning

Large language models (LLMs) for generative AI can be expensive to build on-site and need highly qualified personnel. Businesses can use the most affordable hardware and adjust to new technological developments with the aid of a hybrid cloud configuration. However, creating and executing AI workloads on a hybrid cloud using publicly accessible clouds may present additional privacy, security, and data management challenges.

Edge computing

Businesses may more easily stage time-sensitive and data-intensive processes closer to the source by utilising edge computing in a hybrid cloud environment. This lowers latency, simplifies networking needs, and improves data safety.
Zero-trust architectures and other management strategies, however, may be necessary to maintain security in dispersed systems.

Mergers and acquisitions

When completing a merger or acquisition, it is crucial to integrate data and applications from the previous organisation to the new one. According to Infosys consultant Mike Fitzgerald, “the majority of significant IT cleanups involved mergers that were never integrated and, ultimately, became a backpack of rocks.” Differences in HR, ERP, CRM, and transactional systems can be better handled by hybrid cloud. IT will still need to handle the complexity brought about by many platforms, hardware, and application infrastructures.

Hybrid cloud Challenges

The following are some of the hybrid cloud problems that CIOs need to confront and overcome in addition to the advantages:

Compatibility

In a hybrid cloud architecture, on-premises and public cloud environments collaborate, but they are not entirely interoperable or synchronised. For instance, a hybrid cloud application’s back-end data centre component is unable to react as fast as the public cloud front-end component, leading to latency issues and other complications.

Data management

In a hybrid cloud, improper data transfer and placement can lead to financial and security issues. Businesses must encrypt all traffic in order to protect data while it is in transit. To prevent transferring data across cloud environments and incurring network and egress fees, they should also populate data in the appropriate environment. In order to avoid needless transfers and charge spikes, relevant workloads should also be stored in public cloud storage.

Intricate access control

One of the more important hybrid cloud security issues is authorisation and authentication. To access data in both public and private cloud environments, organisations need to implement centralised protocols. Make use of single sign-on and identity and access control tools. To make access control easier, only provide permissions when absolutely required. Data security flaws in hybrid clouds may be caused by configuration mistakes, inadequate regulatory or compliance implementation, a lack of updates and other essential software maintenance, and other oversights.

Network dependence

Due to its vital reliance on access, including internet connectivity, a hybrid cloud places a great deal of stress on WAN availability, capacity, and latency. Any loss or disturbance to the network will essentially stop hybrid cloud operations. Companies need to plan for backup WAN connectivity and deploy sufficient WAN resources.

Skills gap

Adoption of hybrid clouds necessitates a certain set of technical abilities from both IT personnel and users. A private data centre requires a different level of expertise than public cloud infrastructure and services, and the learning curve to bridge that gap may result in human error. In order to build private clouds and run hybrid clouds, businesses may need to hire more IT personnel.

Private cloud maintenance

Since a hybrid cloud is essentially a dedicated portion of the local data centre, its on-premises or private cloud component necessitates a significant investment, upkeep, and level of knowledge. A private cloud may become even more complex if additional software is implemented, such as databases, help desk systems, and other tools. Hybrid cloud adoption can be facilitated by careful data planning, public cloud security technologies, staff training, and cloud certifications.

What are hybrid cloud platforms?

The core of hybrid cloud systems are hybrid cloud management tools, which make sure that the components of the private and public clouds are coordinating to meet the intended business objectives.

Several well-liked hybrid orchestration models are as follows:

Customer managed

Private cloud solutions, frequently in the form of hyperconverged infrastructure, can be implemented in both on-premises and edge contexts. Important components of these systems are being offered as SaaS products.

Vendor managed

As a completely hosted hardware and software solution, hybrid solutions may be deployed and managed by vendors in edge and data centre environments.

Partner managed

Numerous cloud and hosted infrastructure companies that provide reliable infrastructure and operations compatible with on-site private cloud solutions offer hybrid cloud solutions.

Cloud provider-managed

In addition to a conventional cloud service portfolio, hyperscale cloud providers provide solutions built on a foundation of standardised operations and infrastructure that work with private cloud solutions.