Hybrid cloud is gaining ground

Now that we all have our “heads” in the cloud, it’s important to understand where we are headed with Hybrid Clouds. The evolution of cloud computing has taken the data center and all of the required supporting technologies to a new level, so it’s important to understand what the step will be.

When it comes to a high-level understanding of the cloud platform, there are 4 models generally known:

• Private – This is where an organization elects to host their equipment and present a cloud model which is managed and controlled by the internal IT team. Resources, physical and virtual, all belong to the organization.

• Public – With this model, an organization may choose to work with an outside cloud provider for their hosting needs. Applications, servers and workloads are all provisioned from resources owned by the third party provider.

• Community/Multi-Tenant – Instead of giving each organization their own server in the cloud for this app, the hosting company allows multiple customers to connect into their environment for multi tenancy and logically segment their sessions.

• Hybrid – A hybrid cloud is an environment in which an organization provides and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally. These cloud models are being adopted by numerous organizations looking to leverage the direct benefits of both a private and public cloud environment.

Many businesses currently see the benefits of working with some type of cloud model, but after taking a closer look, you may quickly realize that almost all platforms have a piece of their cloud in the hybrid space. Many organizations are cross-connecting with more resources, more users and a lot more devices all over the world; or in many cases, the workloads, data and applications they are accessing isn’t even located on a corporate-owned data center, but through a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Why is the Hybrid Cloud becoming more and more popular?

A study released by Rackspace suggests that IT managers want a mix of public and private cloud in their enterprises. The research found that 60 % of the 400 enterprises surveyed see the hybrid cloud model as the way to go. It also found that 60 % of respondents have moved or are considering moving certain applications or workloads either partially (41 %) or completely (19 %) off the public cloud because of its limitations.

The reality now is that many organizations are utilizing resources both inside and outside of their data center. With so much cross-connection and outside integration, almost all cloud-based organizations look to resources located outside of their infrastructure. This can be a SaaS application, some type of file sharing solution, or even new initiatives around mobility. So here are some reasons why Hybrid Cloud is gaining so much popularity:

• More resources – With hybrid cloud we have more bandwidth, new ways to connect, and greater amounts of infrastructure convergence. As the integration of storage, networking and computing capabilities have increased, so did the delivery methods of cloud computing. Hybrid cloud models are now able to cross-connect with distributed data centers and utilize vast amounts of bandwidth which has now been optimized by virtual WANOP appliances.

• Software-defined technologies – SDN has helped bridge a lot of the cloud computing communication that has to happen on such a large layer. By better integrating complex routing and switching methodologies at the logical layer, software-defined networking allows administrators to create vast hybrid cloud networks capable of advanced inter-connectivity.

• Logical and physical integration – New APIs are forcing IT professionals to rethink how applications and resources integrate together. We are able to eliminate entire layers to allow for greater application and data communication.

Finally, I believe we are looking at a single general hybrid cloud model which will support a number of varying systems, don’t you?

Photo credit: comparethecloud.net