The Wanstor Guide to using a Hybrid Cloud Strategy

Hybrid Cloud can be valuable to any organisation that operates within the digital landscape.

If you are asking yourself what Hybrid Cloud is, we're here to help. Within this guide, you can find out all you need to know about Hybrid Cloud, hybrid infrastructure, and the benefits that can be achieved using Hybrid Cloud within your workplace.

What is Hybrid Cloud?

So, what is Hybrid Cloud? Hybrid infrastructures help to modernise applications within the workplace, incorporating a degree of workload profitability, orchestration, and management within at least two computing environments. These usually consist of Public Clouds and Private Clouds, although in some cases there are one or more of each. To understand what Hybrid Cloud is, we must understand both the Public Cloud and Private Cloud.

Public Cloud

Once ran exclusively off-premises, Public Cloud providers are now able to run Public Cloud services on-premises, within their clients’ data centres.

Private Cloud

These were once solely ran on-premises, with modernised applications, organisations have the ability to build Private Clouds off-premises, within hired data centres.

The Best Use of Hybrid Cloud

When proficiently utilising Hybrid Cloud solutions, the best use of Hybrid Cloud should allow for the following:

• Connect multiple computers through a network
• Consolidate IT resources
• Scale out and quickly provision new resources
• Move workloads between different environments
• Incorporate a single, unified management tool
• Orchestrate processes with the assistance of automation

As public and Private Clouds work in unison as part of the Hybrid Cloud, the use of Hybrid Cloud should be no different to how either public or Private Clouds work. This includes:

• Local area networks (LAN)
• Wide area networks (WAN)
• Virtual private network (VPN)

With management software, we can allocate these resources into environments where applications can run. This then allows for them to be provisioned immediately with help from an authentication facility. Both separate clouds become a hybrid infrastructure when they are seamlessly connected, offering interconnectivity.

The use of Hybrid Cloud interconnectivity allows for workloads to be moved and managed in unison, allowing for all processes to be orchestrated. The potential of the use of Hybrid Cloud depends on how well-developed these connections are, which will have a direct impact on the effectiveness of the hybrid infrastructure.

Hybrid Infrastructure Explained

Utilising a hybrid infrastructure appropriately will depend on a variety of factors. As each Hybrid Cloud is unique, the use of Hybrid Cloud in your workplace will depend on how you organise the resources within it, as well as other factors relating to the individuality of your hybrid infrastructure. There are generally two different types of hybrid infrastructure.

These include the following:

Traditional Hybrid Infrastructure

Hybrid Clouds were once the result of connecting private and Public Cloud environments. The Private Cloud was built independently or through the use of pre-packaged cloud infrastructure while a Public Cloud would also be needed. Some of the Public Clouds in question included:

• Alibaba Cloud
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Google Cloud
• IBM Cloud
• Microsoft Azure

When linking the public and Private Clouds, middleware or a preconfigured VPN would be needed to move vast amounts of sources between these environments.

Modern Hybrid Infrastructure

In the modern workplace, Hybrid Clouds are architected somewhat differently to how they once were. Rather than connecting the environments, instead, the best managed IT teams can build hybrid infrastructures by focusing on the portability of apps that navigate through these environments.

Modern IT teams build Hybrid Clouds by focusing on the application while developing and deploying them as smaller, independent, and loosely coupled services. With this level of synchronicity, the Hybrid Cloud allows for a universal extension to environments below, allowing for interconnectivity on a mass scale.