Hybrid cloud storage and networking solutions are the ideal fit for many businesses, because they allow for a great deal of flexibility in deploying workloads. With a hybrid cloud setup, you have your private cloud for sensitive data and confidential operations, and your public cloud for when you need more resources.
And it’s no surprise that many enterprises are switching to a hybrid cloud model. Public cloud service providers can’t offer a bespoke experience to enterprise clients, and they often can’t even offer security and privacy. Private clouds, though, are difficult and expensive to scale, and have limited resources. Hybrid cloud networking mitigates the limitations of both private and public cloud networking options, by combining them together.
Marry Public and Private Networks
Hybrid cloud networks are built from a combination of a private cloud and a public cloud. The private cloud typically resides on private, on-premises servers. The public cloud is provided by a public cloud service provider. The two are usually integrated together, so that data can easily be moved back and forth. Sometimes, edge computing architecture will be incorporated into the hybrid cloud to enhance operational speed and make services more accessible to users.
Lower Costs and Boost Efficiency
When you implement a hybrid cloud networking design for your organization, you can significantly cut networking costs. Many organizations need to be able to keep sensitive information and business processes confidential, so they need a private network, but running all of your operations on a private network can quickly add up.
With a hybrid networking solution, you can have the private side for things that need to stay private, and the public side to give your organization access to the computing resources it needs, at a lower cost than maintaining more private server banks. Business needs can change fast and unexpectedly, as the COVID-19 pandemic proved, and the flexibility that public cloud services offer can enable your organization to maintain business continuity in changing circumstances, because it gives you the ability to pivot quickly when you need to.
Keep Your Sensitive Data Safe
Plenty of regulatory environments require organizations to keep certain data confidential, and of course, your enterprise probably has proprietary processes or confidential relationships that it needs to keep to itself. Public cloud providers simply can’t offer the security you need to adhere to regulatory requirements in many jurisdictions – in some cases, you’re even required to keep sensitive data in an on-site server.
Public cloud providers tend to be much more vulnerable to cyberattacks and data breaches than private cloud networks, because they’re so much more open to the public and visible to criminals. If your data is compromised in such a breach, you’re responsible, not your cloud provider. You can’t control the structure of the public cloud or its level of security, but you can control your private cloud, including maintaining protocols for how it should be structured, who has access to it, and how the data is managed across the organization, even when it must travel to the public cloud for analysis.
Get More Flexibility
Flexibility and scalability have been the watchwords of cloud computing, and they’re not something you tend to get from a private cloud network. Adding resources to a private network can be costly and take time that you might not have to spare when unexpected changes occur. But when you have a hybrid cloud setup, you can turn to the public cloud for the resources and computing power you need, and you can get it immediately.
Private cloud networks can provide extensive resources, to be fair, but those resources are nevertheless limited by the size and capacity of your onsite data center. Public cloud networks have virtually unlimited resources for computing and storage. Public cloud providers have built their services to help clients pivot on a dime, so when you need agility, you have it. You can immediately deploy the computing, storage, and other cloud resources you need, when you need them, with just a little migration prep, such as anonymizing data, to bring a workload from the private to the public cloud. It’s much easier and more cost-effective to draw extra resources from the public cloud as needed, rather than to try and scale up your private data center – especially if you only need the extra resources at certain times, like during crunch times.
When it comes to storage and computing capabilities for your business, it’s time to consider a hybrid cloud solution. It brings the security of a private data center together with the flexibility of a public cloud computing provider, so your company can always be ready to tackle whatever comes your way.
