Hybrid Cloud Computing: A Quick Guide

The evolution of cloud computing has been seemingly nonstop. In a world where remote computing was just a pipe dream 15 years ago, now it’s everywhere — and changing every day.

The newest and most popular development in this sector, known as hybrid cloud computing, has left many scratching their heads as to what, exactly, this new type of remote computing is exactly. If you’ve got no idea yourself, don’t worry: we’ve got a quick guide for you.

Hybrid Cloud Computing: The Best of Both Worlds?

In the world of the cloud computing, there are roughly two different types of flavors. You can access public cloud services through a third party, which has its own benefits and drawbacks, or you can maintain private cloud services on your own, which also has advantages and disadvantages. Yet hybrid cloud services, as the name implies, is not just one or the other but a combination of public and private cloud computing at the same time.

The combination of public and private cloud services isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, many companies today may already be using public services in conjunction with private cloud resources. Yet it’s only recently that the term “hybrid cloud” has come into use with any kind of frequency. The reason for this is that taking a hybrid approach to your cloud computing needs can often provide your organization with the best parts of both approaches while minimizing the impact of their downsides.

Public vs Private Cloud Capabilities

As mentioned above, both public and private cloud services have different strengths and weaknesses. A public cloud is an excellent low-cost choice for companies looking to stretch their resources, as you can gain access to cloud computing without having to maintain hardware, networking storage, or the applications installed on these systems. Instead, a third party manages the actual systems, and you just pay a small monthly fee.

This makes public cloud systems great for workloads that lack complexity or require repetitive functions, an example being e-mail servers. Yet public clouds are less ideal for companies that need more agile and diverse access to data and applications. In this way, private clouds are much more preferable in that since an organization has complete control over the environment, it’s not limited to what a third party provides. Yes, the overhead can be higher if you’re maintaining these systems personally, but there’s often no other way to gain access to custom-designed cloud computing capabilities.

The Hybrid Cloud: Bringing Them All Together

Now we come to the hybrid cloud. You can guess where we’re going with this: taking a hybrid approach to cloud computing means combining the use of a private cloud with public services. There are likely to be at least one interface point between these two environments, though usually more, and the goal of this hybrid system is to unify and automate the management of this environment through this combination of data and services.

This is rapidly becoming the new normal for corporate computing. While not every company that uses both public and private cloud services can say they use a hybrid cloud approach, those that do — in other words, those that integrate both approaches into one unified environment — are tripping along the cutting edge of cloud computing like none other.