Hybrid cloud infrastructure What is hybrid cloud infrastructure?
Hybrid cloud infrastructure combines public, private, and on-premises data centers to fulfill IT requirements. It allows to manage and migrate workloads across multiple infrastructures to improve efficiency, cost, and digital transformation.
- What are the benefits of hybrid cloud infrastructure?
- What are the best practices for hybrid cloud infrastructure?
- What are the challenges in hybrid cloud infrastructure?
- What are the use cases and examples of hybrid cloud infrastructure?
- How does HPE helps you with hybrid cloud infrastructure?
What are the benefits of hybrid cloud infrastructure?
- Security and compliance: Hybrid cloud lets enterprises preserve sensitive data in a secure private cloud while using the public cloud for less important tasks. This is especially useful for firms with strong data protection rules.
- Scalability and cost efficiency: By operating core apps on their on-premises infrastructure or private cloud, businesses may use the public cloud's practically infinite scalability to address unexpected demand surges while reducing operational expenses.
- Flexible and agility: The hybrid cloud approach gives enterprises more IT resource deployment and management options. Based on workload demands, they can pick public, private, or on-premises environments. This makes firms more adaptable to market changes.
- Improved disaster recovery: By duplicating data and apps between private and public clouds, enterprises may maintain business continuity after a system failure.
- Improved performance: Hybrid cloud lets enterprises use the public cloud for high-performance computing and data-intensive tasks while keeping low-latency on-premises resources.
What are the best practices for hybrid cloud infrastructure?
- Workload management: Prioritize tasks based on sensitivity and criticality. Less sensitive workloads can benefit from the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the public cloud, while keeping critical data and applications in the secure environment of a private cloud.
- Hybrid networking strategies: Implement effective strategies to seamlessly integrate your on-premises infrastructure with public and private clouds. This ensures optimal data transfer and efficient communication across the hybrid environment.
- Automation and infrastructure as Code (IaC): Utilize automation tools and IaC to streamline provisioning, configuration, and management of resources across the hybrid infrastructure. This reduces manual errors and ensures consistency across deployments.
- Security and compliance: Maintain a robust security posture across the entire hybrid cloud environment. This includes data encryption, identity and access management, and adherence to relevant data privacy regulations.
- Cloud management platform (CMP): Consider using a CMP to provide a unified interface for managing and monitoring resources across your hybrid cloud infrastructure. This simplifies administration and helps optimize resource utilization.
What are the challenges in hybrid cloud infrastructure?
With more clouds and more runtimes brought by organizational needs, critical challenges emerge in hybrid environments that require careful strategies:
- Complexity: Integrating and orchestrating workloads across diverse infrastructures with different tools and technologies can make managing a hybrid cloud system challenging.
- Slow and costly ITOps and compliance exposures resulting from incomplete visibility and control as environments become more diverse and dispersed.
- Organizations risk vendor lock-in by relying on certain cloud providers without considering resource options. This may reduce flexibility and raise expenses.
- Slow, inflexible on-prem IT that cannot serve developers and data scientists as well as public cloud.
- A lack of data readiness for AI and analytics initiatives due to data siloes and inflexible data platforms.
- Cost optimization: Analyze and manage resource use in public and private clouds to optimize costs in hybrid environments.
Understanding these issues and concerns helps firms create a well-defined plan for adopting and maintaining their hybrid cloud architecture to optimize advantages and reduce risks.
What are the use cases and examples of hybrid cloud infrastructure?
- Disaster recovery and business continuity: Organizations employ hybrid cloud architecture to guarantee that critical systems and data are accessible in the event of a disaster. For example, a financial institution may back up and recover on-premises data to a public cloud to avoid data loss or downtime.
- Environments for development and testing: Hybrid cloud infrastructure makes scalable and economic development and testing environments possible. Developers can quickly set up public cloud testing environments while keeping critical production data on-premises or in a private cloud. Software companies can test new apps in the public cloud before deploying them.
- Big data processing and analytics: Businesses use hybrid cloud infrastructure to manage big data processing and analytics. High-demand data processing can be scaled out using public cloud resources while sensitive data remains on-premises. Retail companies may study consumer data in the public cloud to understand buying patterns while keeping proprietary sales data on-premises.
- Regulatory compliance: Due to hybrid cloud architecture, businesses can adhere to industry regulations and data privacy standards. They can store sensitive data on-premises or in a private cloud and use public cloud resources to comply with regulations for non-sensitive tasks. To comply with HIPAA, healthcare institutions can store EHRs on-premises and use public cloud services for non-sensitive administrative tasks.
- High-performance computing (HPC): Applications requiring a lot of processing power can benefit from hybrid cloud architecture. Public cloud resources can scale HPC workloads during high demand while sensitive data is kept on-premises. A research institution may run complex simulations or data-intensive calculations in the public cloud but store data on-premises for security and compliance.
How does HPE helps you with hybrid cloud infrastructure?
Empowering your hybrid cloud Journey with HPE
HPE provides a comprehensive set of services and solutions tailored to suit your hybrid cloud journey:
- Planning and strategy:
HPE Transformation Services: HPE's consulting prowess crafts a bespoke hybrid cloud strategy aligned with your business objectives. Benefit from expert assessment, workload placement insights, and a roadmap for seamless implementation.
- Migration and optimization:
Private cloud: Simplify infrastructure with a pay-as-you-go private cloud solution, offering enterprise and business editions for flexibility and control. Enjoy cloud-like agility while retaining data sovereignty.
HPE Accelerated Migration Services: Use HPE's proven methodologies to seamlessly migrate workloads to your hybrid cloud environment with minimal disruption.
- Management and operations:
HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management: Offload the management of your hybrid cloud infrastructure with ongoing support services. HPE GreenLake handles monitoring and optimization for you.
Morpheus simplifies hybrid cloud infrastructure management by providing a unified platform to control public clouds, private clouds, and bare metal environments, eliminating the need for multiple management tools and APIs. It abstracts infrastructure complexities, enabling users to define resources in a standardized way and deploy them consistently across environments. Utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Morpheus supports versioned, shared, and reusable blueprints for automated provisioning, reducing manual errors. It automates infrastructure provisioning and orchestration, accelerates deployments, and minimizes manual efforts.
Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Company: Enhance disaster recovery and streamline IT operations with Zerto's workload mobility.
OpsRamp, a Hewlett Packard Company: OpsRamp's unified monitoring and automation platform.
- Data management and analytics:
HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Software: Unify your data across the hybrid cloud with HPE Ezmeral, simplifying management, governance, and analytics for valuable insights from all sources.
- Application modernization:
HPE Application Modernization Services: Transform legacy applications for hybrid cloud readiness, optimizing performance, scalability, and agility.
