What Is a Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid cloud combines public and private clouds. It is the main model and development direction of cloud computing in recent years. We already know that private clouds are mainly for enterprise users. For security reasons, enterprises are more willing to store data in private clouds, but at the same time they hope to obtain public cloud computing resources. In this case, hybrid clouds are becoming more and more popular. More adoption, it mixes and matches public and private clouds to obtain the best results. This personalized solution achieves the purpose of saving money and security.

Better

The security of the private cloud is beyond that of the public cloud, and the computing resources of the public cloud are beyond the reach of the private cloud. In this case of spears and shields, the hybrid cloud solves this problem. It can use the security of the private cloud to save important internal data in the local data center. At the same time, it can also use the public cloud computing resources to more efficiently and quickly Complete the work, it is more complete than the private cloud or the public cloud.

Scalable

The hybrid cloud breaks through the hardware limitations of the private cloud and leverages the scalability of the public cloud to obtain higher computing power at any time. By moving non-confidential functions to the public cloud area, enterprises can reduce the pressure and demand for internal private clouds.

More savings

Hybrid clouds can effectively reduce costs. It can use both public and private clouds, and businesses can place applications and data on the most suitable platform for the best combination of benefits.

Hybrid clouds provide many important capabilities that can benefit businesses of all shapes and sizes. These new capabilities enable businesses to leverage the hybrid cloud to expand their IT infrastructure like never before. Let's take a look at the five advantages of hybrid clouds.

lower the cost

Reducing costs is one of the most attractive advantages of cloud computing, and it is also an important factor driving enterprise management to consider cloud services. The incremental cost of upgrading on-premise infrastructure is high, and adding on-premise computing resources requires the purchase of additional servers, storage, power, and the need to build new data centers in some extreme cases. Hybrid cloud can help enterprises reduce costs and use "pay as you go" cloud computing resources to eliminate the need to purchase local resources.

Increase storage and scalability

Hybrid cloud provides a cost-effective way for enterprises to expand storage. The cost of cloud storage is much lower than equivalent local storage. It is a good choice for backing up, copying VMs, and archiving data. In addition, there is no upfront cost and local resource requirements for adding cloud storage.

Improve availability and access

Although cloud computing does not guarantee that services will always function properly, public clouds are often more available than most on-premises infrastructure. The cloud has built-in redundancy and provides geo-replication of critical data. In addition, technologies such as Hyper-V replicas and SQL Server AlwaysOn availability groups allow us to leverage cloud computing to improve HA and DR. The cloud also provides almost ubiquitous connectivity, enabling global organizations to access cloud services from almost anywhere.

Improve agility and flexibility

One of the biggest benefits of a hybrid cloud is flexibility. A hybrid cloud enables you to migrate resources and workloads from on-premises to the cloud and vice versa. For development and testing, hybrid clouds enable developers to easily get new virtual machines and applications without the assistance of IT operations staff. You can also take advantage of an elastically scalable hybrid cloud to scale some applications into the cloud to handle peak processing needs. The cloud also provides a variety of services, such as BI, analytics, IoT, etc. You can use these services at any time instead of building them yourself.

Gain application integration benefits

Many applications provide built-in hybrid cloud integration capabilities. For example, as mentioned earlier, both Hyper-V replicas and SQL Server AlwaysOn availability groups have built-in cloud integration capabilities. New technologies such as SQL Server's Stretch Databases feature also enable you to deploy databases on-premises to the cloud. ^[1]

For information control, scalability, sudden demand, and failover needs. Mixing and matching private and public clouds is a good thing. We have built some

Although many people call for a hybrid cloud, it can take advantage of the benefits of private cloud and public cloud. But hybrid cloud is not without its drawbacks. It still contains some security obstacles. Keep in mind the following five issues.

1 Hybrid cloud 1, lack of data redundancy

Public cloud providers provide important resources to ensure that their infrastructure is efficient and accessible when needed by end users. Despite the best efforts of cloud providers, problems are still inevitable.

The highly publicized outages highlight the risk of running applications in a single data center without failover in other data centers. Cloud architects need redundancy across data centers to mitigate the impact of a single data center outage. The lack of redundancy can be a serious security risk for hybrid clouds, especially if data redundancy backups are not distributed across data centers. Moving virtual machine (VM) instances between data centers is much easier than moving between large data sets.

Cloud architects can use multiple data centers from a single vendor for redundancy, or multiple public cloud vendors or hybrid clouds. At the same time, hybrid cloud can be used to improve business continuity, because this is not the reason for implementing this model. By using multiple data centers from a single vendor at the same time, you can save costs and achieve similar levels of risk reduction.

2 Hybrid cloud 2, compliance

Maintaining and demonstrating compliance with hybrid cloud regulations is more difficult. Not only must you ensure that your public and private cloud providers comply with regulations, you must also demonstrate compliance between the two clouds.

For example, if your business processes payment card data, you may be able to prove that your internal systems and your cloud provider comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS). With the introduction of hybrid clouds, you must ensure that data transfers between the two clouds are protected.

In addition, you need to ensure that card data is not transferred from a compliance data center on a private cloud to a less secure public cloud storage system. The methods used by your internal systems to prevent vulnerabilities may not translate directly to the public cloud.

3SLA Hybrid cloud 3, poorly structured SLA

You may be convinced that your public cloud provider can consistently meet the detailed specifications expected in a service level agreement (SLA), but does your private cloud have the same SLA? If not, you may need to create an SLA based on the expectations of the two clouds, most likely based on your own private cloud.

Collect data under a workload that shows the availability and performance of your private cloud. Integrating public and private clouds seeking for potential problems can disrupt services. For example, if the business-critical drivers of a private cloud maintain sensitive and confidential data locally, then your SLA should reflect the restrictions of using these services in the public cloud.

4 Hybrid cloud 4. Risk management

From a business perspective, information security is about managing risk. Cloud computing (especially hybrid cloud) uses new application programming interfaces (APIs), requires complex network configurations, and challenges the knowledge and capabilities of traditional system administrators.

These factors introduce new types of threats. Cloud computing is no more secure than internal infrastructure, but a hybrid cloud is a complex system. Administrators' limited management experience may create risks.

5 Hybrid cloud 5, security management

Existing security controls, such as identity authentication, authorization, and identity management, need to work together in public and private clouds. To integrate these security protocols, you can only choose one: copy control in two clouds and keep secure data synchronized, or use identity management services to provide a single service running in the cloud. Allocate enough time during the planning and time phases to address these rather complex integration issues. ^[3]