Most businesses nowadays have already integrated hybrid cloud computing in some part of their IT infrastructure. In fact, many have already shifted their entire workloads to hybrid cloud computing. This migration is due to the many benefits that hybrid cloud computing offers. Let’s take a look at five major benefits of the hybrid cloud that make it viable for organizations.
It helps cut costs
There are four types of cloud computing: private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud. A hybrid cloud strategy combines the advantages of on-premises IT with cloud computing for many enterprises. A hybrid cloud environment consists of two or more clouds (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models.
By taking advantage of the best deployment models for each unique workload, the hybrid cloud allows organizations to achieve more with their IT budgets. It makes it simple to separate IT costs into capital and operating costs. Enterprises may utilize technologies to monitor cloud usage and acquire detailed information on cloud service consumption – and cost – by department, management, workload, or other criteria.
It enables scalability and adaptability
Cloud computing is built on the concept of agility. Although a private cloud allows for some provisioning and scaling agility, the quantity of accessible resources in a physical data center remains restricted.
In contrast, customers of public clouds can rapidly build computing and storage, as well as related services, with no resource limits. However, expect some migration prep work when migrating a local workload from private infrastructure to the public cloud.
One of the primary advantages of a hybrid cloud is consistency. It is simpler to develop, transfer, and grow workloads and resources if the private cloud provides instance types and services identical to those accessible in the public cloud of choice.
This consistency allows businesses to deploy and employ private cloud resources when they are suitable and cost-effective, and then readily draw on more resources from the public cloud when needed.
It improves security
The major security problem in the public cloud is that the user does not have access to or control over the full cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, the cloud provider assumes responsibility for securing customers’ cloud settings but is seldom held accountable when a breach or other malicious conduct happens.
In many circumstances, keeping data on-premises is the best approach to secure it. The most sensitive data and important workloads remain within the owned data center on a private infrastructure, where the assets are maintained and safeguarded by the organization’s IT personnel.
By combining public and private cloud environments, enterprises can ensure proper cloud governance and data protection. The hybrid cloud shares data across multiple cloud environments, and this shared data always travels over an encrypted network. By keeping sensitive data on-premises, enterprises can establish a logical perimeter to keep attackers out.
It helps ensure compliance
One advantage of public cloud computing is its worldwide reach and abundance. Most workload processes should be supported by networking, storage, and computing technologies from data centers situated practically everywhere – even at the network edge.
National boundaries, on the other hand, can come into play, with legislative restrictions on where corporations can store data and run computer tasks. For some international corporations, this hinders the transition to completely public cloud computing.
A hybrid cloud allows a company to run sensitive workloads in its private cloud while moving data to and from the public cloud as the legal landscape shifts or data and workloads grow. An enterprise, for example, can collect personally identifiable customer data in a private cloud, sanitize it in-house, and then transmit it to a public cloud application for processing or analysis, such as a big data processing project.
Business continuity, or the capacity of a company to continue operating, is frequently a key component of regulatory compliance. A hybrid cloud may also help with application, data, and disaster recovery duties, which protects against system failures, security difficulties, and physical calamities.
Hybrid cloud solutions are frequently custom-built by providers for a certain sector. As a result, they accommodate the industry’s norms and regulations.
You may automate compliance and ensure that regulatory and industry standards are satisfied using cloud archiving solutions.
Compliance automation lowers the risk of human mistakes and assists you in ensuring that data is correctly removed once the retention period has expired. Furthermore, archive material is quickly located and accessible, making it simpler to comply with legal requests and e-discovery.
Over to you
You now know some of the benefits that a hybrid cloud offers. However, it’s important to remember that a hybrid cloud needs extensive planning, the right tools, and a reliable partner.
Cloud solutions can automate security and compliance processes, which simplifies operations and lowers risk. Once the right provider is on board, enterprises can maximize the value of their hybrid cloud investments.