Hybrid clouds are turning out to be the best way for enterprises to enable employees’ continued access to powerful on-demand public cloud resources without losing control over corporate data, corporate security, the ability to comply with legal requirements (e.g., ensuring employee and customer privacy), or the maintenance of legacy capabilities.
Public cloud + private cloud = necessity
After all, you’re not going to get line-of-business employees trying to do their jobs as effectively and efficiently as possible to cease their Shadow IT habits. They’ll invariably sign up for one of those quite excellent public cloud application services — whether you like it or not. Whether you even know it or not.
And odds are you can’t afford to devote your IT people’s limited time to building in-house replacements for such services. This makes a hybrid cloud architecture a necessity for most enterprises, since a hybrid cloud combines use of
- Public cloud application services that mask complexity with cloud automation embedded in programmable APIs and self-service portals available via a few clicks on an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard, and
- A private cloud’s unique, business-critical customizations and enforcement of security and compliance policies.
The secret sauce: cloud automation
Depending on the state of your technology infrastructure — and particularly if you’ve brought virtualization to your data center — your existing in-house environment may contain many of the elements you need for the private cloud portion of a hybrid cloud architecture .
But virtualization alone won’t get you a private cloud or the ability to manage the complexity of integrating the constantly changing line-up of technology resources and services used in your business.
Data center virtualization isn’t the same as deploying a private cloud infrastructure that involves automating such tasks as addressing, network routing, load-balancing, workload isolation, scale-out management, and more.
Fortunately, hybrid cloud tools, infrastructures, and architectures have matured fast. Containers, microservices, and unikernels are making it easier to migrate services between public and private clouds, to rapidly scale them up and out, and to manage the dynamic operational complexity of maintaining infrastructure performance, security, disaster recovery standards, storage needs, and more.
Hybrid cloud’s many shapes and types
The technology resources integration enabled by hybrid cloud architectures will be unique to each enterprise, including yours — and you may be surprised at the improvements the right hybrid cloud configuration can bring to your organization’s performance and costs.
An expert hybrid cloud services provider who knows how to help you review your business goals, prioritize your needs, and address your technology gaps can make an enormous difference to your business and your future.
