The heart of cloud computing stems from a vision – that everyone is interconnected and empowered with the ability to access applications and information from anywhere. High-speed internet connectivity, the biggest enabler to this vision, has allowed enterprises to pivot to a new operational model of enabling both their customers and employees to access information anytime and anywhere. Thus, enterprises also now utilize the public cloud to fulfill a variety of functions, including storage, compute and have increasingly adopted to pay for use for such functions.
However, while trust in the public cloud has increased tremendously over the years, the cloud isn’t perfect. Security and reliability concerns continue to be a challenge and show no signs of abating. A data breach could result in the loss of a firm’s brand equity, customer trust and subsequently loss of customers. Industries dealing with highly sensitive data, such as healthcare and financial services, are subject to compliance and data privacy laws that deem public cloud unviable. Therefore, the need for a managed “bridge” between on-premise compute and the cloud was born, and the concept of a “hybrid cloud” emerged.
According to Gartner, hybrid cloud is defined as policy-based and coordinated service provisioning, use and management across a mixture of internal and external cloud services. These services could include IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Ideally, a well-deployed hybrid cloud model enables organizations to place workloads on the most appropriate infrastructure depending on business priorities and workload and compliance requirements.
Hybrid cloud for hybrid work
Having a true hybrid cloud implies management of workloads, storage and network resources limiting risks and ensuring productivity improvements.
As remote working becomes the norm, enterprises transform, integrating multiple clouds is critical to provide for the ability to scale. This flexibility coupled with a robust security infrastructure is the need of the hour. Some of the classical hybrid cloud use cases that have gained traction are:
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- Workload testing – IT departments use resources in the public cloud to test new applications in their development cycle.
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- Availability – For certain non-critical workloads and applications, data can be replicated across the public cloud with other resources remaining non-operational until needed. This should significantly improve availability in case of any exigencies.
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- Cloud bursting – Temporary, high-capacity demand spikes can be “spilled over” to a different cloud environment to meet situational workload demands.
Hybrid strategy – it’s all about data management
The criticality of on-premise infrastructure remains. Storage demands continue to increase. Critical core applications continue to be prioritized in private clouds. Businesses need an IT infrastructure that can handle data from edge locations to core data centers to the public cloud, while also embracing automation and cloud-like operations. Enterprises that wish to achieve competitive differentiation need to manage their data efficiently no matter where it resides.
With more infrastructure management consistency across clouds, it would take 35% less time on average to change where an application runs and as applications become more portable, organizations can adjust where workloads run in real-time to capitalize on changing economic profiles among clouds. In fact, increased cloud management consistency drives down overall costs, and the average estimated savings is 19%.
The sky’s the limit
A hybrid cloud deployment should always aim to bring the best of the public cloud to the data center and vice versa.
Dell Technologies will continue to modernize its core infrastructure portfolio and drive new innovations through an open ecosystem, designed to help customers better protect, manage and support traditional and modern applications across edge locations, core data centers and hybrid clouds.
A solution launched during Dell Technologies World Experience 2020, named Project APEX, highlights our commitment to support everything connected with the hybrid cloud. We recently announced new APEX storage solutions, data protection services and DevOps tool designed with multi-cloud capabilities at the core. Multiple clouds, SLAs, operating models and the presence of legacy systems could make an organization’s hybrid cloud journey a complicated one – Project APEX is dedicated to simplifying this process, so customers gain the most from their cloud deployments, be it public or hybrid.
The sky’s the limit where the hybrid cloud is concerned. Start evaluating your hybrid environment today.
