Hybrid clouds are computing environments that combine public, private, or on-premises resources in a single system. These clouds share access, data, and applications between the infrastructures and grant greater computing flexibility and control than public cloud-only systems.
With a hybrid cloud, companies can carefully decide where data and applications should be stored to maximize security and availability and minimize latency. This means the scalability and distribution of cloud resources are accessible while sensitive or regulated data is kept secure. Additionally, organizations can use cloud resources to provide burst capacity for on-premises resources and extend the life of established hardware.
Some Of The Main Benefits Of Hybrid Clouds Include:
Lower Capital Expenses:
Hybrid clouds can help you lower your capital expenses by reducing the need to purchase or maintain on-premises servers and other hardware. Cloud services manage infrastructure for you, converting capital expenses into more flexible and lower debt, operational expenses.
Agility to Explore and Innovate:
Teams can use hybrid solutions to use cloud resources on-demand temporarily and flexibly. This means teams can quickly spin up and take down development and test environments without impacting on-premise performance or making costly investments.
Security:
Most organizations have data and operations that require varying levels of privacy and access. For example, you may want to keep financial documents on-site while allowing customer-facing applications to be hosted in the cloud. Hybrid solutions let you isolate system components and make it easier to layer security measures and access controls.
The Rise of Hybrid Cloud Backup:
Using hybrid cloud resources for backup solutions is a use case that is gaining in popularity. These solutions sync data between local and cloud resources. This enables teams to eliminate single points of failure while ensuring that they can still access data quickly and consistently.
With a hybrid cloud backup strategy, the latency that can come with cloud resources is no longer an issue. Likewise, Internet connectivity doesn’t prevent data from being accessible.
Meanwhile, syncing to cloud resources enables organizations to leverage the cloud’s scalability to ensure that storage resources fit their needs. This eliminates the need for additional expensive hardware purchases and enables teams to free up on-premises resources by moving archives and backups to the cloud.
Typically, hybrid solutions are based on appliances, installed on-premises. These appliances use object storage and store a finite amount of data, usually a few full backups and a certain number of incremental backups worth. Periodically or continuously, depending on your set up, this appliance data is synced to the cloud. It can then be overwritten as needed to maintain a crash-consistent backup. This enables you to maintain a local restore point while accounting for disaster recovery.
