Time to read: 11 minutes 20 seconds | Published: August 11, 2025
Enterprise hybrid cloud What is hybrid cloud?
A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that integrates private (on-premises data centers), public cloud services, and colocation facilities (colo) to create a unified, agile IT infrastructure. This architecture facilitates the flexible movement of data and applications across diverse cloud environments, enhancing flexibility, scalability, resilience, and operational efficiency. With a centralized hybrid control plane, organizations can streamline operations, optimize costs, and bolster both performance and security.
- Hybrid cloud explained
- What are the components of a hybrid cloud?
- Why enterprises use the hybrid cloud?
- What are the benefits of hybrid cloud?
- How does hybrid cloud work?
- What are the best practices for hybrid cloud implementation?
- What hybrid cloud solutions and services does HPE offer?
Hybrid cloud explained
In a hybrid cloud architecture, organizations leverage private clouds for sensitive workloads, ensuring compliance and control, while utilizing public cloud services for dynamic scalability and resource-intensive tasks. Colocation facilities (colo) extend data center capabilities without requiring physical infrastructure expansion, providing high levels of security, redundancy, and connectivity. Together, these components form a robust hybrid cloud infrastructure that balances performance and cost.
The enterprise hybrid cloud model is particularly valuable for today’s businesses. By combining on-premises data centers, colocation facilities, and public clouds, enterprises can optimize costs, meet evolving business needs, and maintain regulatory compliance. Enterprise hybrid cloud deployments often utilize advanced technologies such as virtualization, containerization, storage tools, and software-defined networking to manage resources effectively and accelerate application migration.
Effective enterprise hybrid cloud networking—using LAN, WAN, VPN, and APIs—ensures reliable connectivity between environments. As hybrid multi-cloud becomes the dominant IT model, driven by data gravity, governance, privacy, and performance needs, 88% of enterprise IT environments are now hybrid. With the rise of GenAI and AI workloads, enterprise hybrid clouds are essential for future-ready IT strategies.
However, managing these hybrid environments is complex, especially with market disruptions like VMware/Broadcom price increases. The integration of colocation facilities and hybrid components allows businesses to overcome these challenges, modernize platforms, and achieve optimal performance, efficiency, and cost savings. Enterprise hybrid cloud solutions play a critical role in navigating today’s IT challenges while enabling innovation and scalability. As a result, many organizations are adopting a hybrid-by-design strategy—incorporating a centralized control plane to streamline operations, reduce complexity, and enhance overall efficiency.
What are the components of a hybrid cloud?
By understanding the key components of a hybrid cloud, enterprises can harness the potential of its robust architecture and exploit the available features to enhance their cloud strategy and bring digital transformation.
- On-premises data center: The on-premises data centers refer to the data centers housed within an organization's premises. They include storage systems, servers, network infrastructure, and hardware that help you manage an organization's data and applications. You can run private clouds on the on-premises infrastructure by virtualizing compute resources.
- Public cloud: The public cloud is a cloud computing model in which computing resources and services are delivered over the Internet with the help of a third-party service provider. These include virtual machines, storage, applications, and develop-and-deploy environments and are provided to various enterprises with the same infrastructure. Enterprises can use the public cloud services on a pay-as-you-go per-use and be free to add or remove resources as needed.
- Private cloud: Private cloud is a cloud computing setup available for a single enterprise dedicatedly and offers high security and customization compared to the public cloud. Also, it offers benefits such as access control, flexibility, scalability, and ease of service delivery. Businesses opt for private clouds to maintain the privacy and integrity of confidential documents, personally identifiable information, intellectual property, and other vulnerable data. The private cloud is also a single-tenant setup, as all the resources are available to one client only.
- Colocation facilities (Colos): Third-party data centers where organizations can place their own hardware, benefiting from shared physical infrastructure like power, cooling, and connectivity while retaining control over their IT assets.
- Hybrid cloud management platform: The hybrid cloud management platform combines private and public cloud environments and allows you to control, provision, and automate the workloads of both cloud infrastructures. It enables the effective utilization of resources, quick integration, and unified control over the deployments on the hybrid cloud. You must follow the security and governance policies, understand the workload inventory, and agree to the service level agreements. Hybrid cloud management offers self-service, service aggregation, workload management, cost analytics, management, release, and deployment orchestration capabilities.
- Hybrid cloud automation and orchestration: Cloud orchestration centralizes the management of automated tasks within multiple cloud systems to a single platform. Centralizing control via an orchestration layer allows the creation of interconnected workflows that span multi-cloud environments. Workload automation orchestrates any hybrid environment—hybrid or multi-cloud. When automated, workloads distribution is taken care of, boosting business efficiency, resource optimization and productivity.
- Networking: Reliable and secure connectivity solutions, including LAN, WAN, VPN, and APIs, that facilitate communication and data transfer between on-premises data centers, private clouds, public clouds, and colocation facilities. This also encompasses software-defined networking (SDN) to efficiently manage network resources.
- Security and compliance solutions: Tools and practices designed to ensure data protection, regulatory compliance, and overall security across all components of the hybrid cloud. This includes encryption, identity and access management (IAM), and security information and event management (SIEM) systems.
- Virtualization and containerization: Technologies that abstract and isolate workloads from the underlying hardware, enabling flexible deployment and efficient resource utilization. Virtual machines (VMs) and containers (such as Docker and Kubernetes) are commonly used to streamline application deployment and scaling.
- Storage Solutions: A mix of on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid storage options that provide data persistence and management capabilities. These solutions ensure data is accessible, secure, and efficiently managed across the hybrid cloud infrastructure.
- Integration and middleware: Software that enables interoperability and seamless integration of applications and services across different environments. Middleware solutions facilitate communication between disparate systems and ensure consistent performance and functionality.
By integrating these components, a hybrid cloud environment combines the flexibility and scalability of public cloud services with the control, security, and compliance of private infrastructure. This comprehensive approach allows organizations to optimize their IT resources to effectively meet diverse business needs.
Why enterprises use the hybrid cloud?
Enterprises increasingly rely on the hybrid cloud to address critical business and IT challenges while optimizing their operations. Enterprise hybrid cloud deployments provide a strategic approach to integrating private (on-premises data centers), public cloud services, and colocation facilities into a unified infrastructure that enhances flexibility, scalability, and efficiency.
- Optimizing workloads is one of the key reasons enterprises adopt hybrid cloud architecture. Enterprises can run workloads where they perform best – on-premise/colocation, in private clouds, or in public clouds. Hybrid cloud enables businesses to run critical workloads on dedicated infrastructure, ensuring security and compliance while using the scalability of public clouds for less sensitive tasks. This approach balances performance and governance effectively.
- Resource scalability is another major advantage. Enterprises can dynamically scale resources up or down based on demand, utilizing existing hybrid cloud infrastructure during peak workloads without incurring additional costs for new infrastructure. This prevents resource underutilization during regular operations.
- Business continuity is ensure in hybrid cloud by replicating data and applications across private and public clouds, minimizing downtime during outages or failures. With its pay-as-you-go model, it delivers cost efficiency, allowing businesses to optimize expenses by selecting affordable infrastructure for specific workloads.
- Speed of innovation is significantly accelerated with hybrid cloud. Enterprises can migrate workloads off-premises, leveraging cloud scalability and flexibility to drive innovation. The adoption of GenAI and AI workloads plays a pivotal role in this trend, as AI applications demand the computational power and adaptability that enterprise hybrid clouds are uniquely positioned to provide.
With technologies like virtualization, containerization, storage tools, and software-defined networking, enterprises can effectively manage their hybrid environments, ensuring scalability, compliance, and performance while embracing cutting-edge innovations like GenAI.
What are the benefits of hybrid cloud?
- Enhanced flexibility and scalability: Hybrid clouds allow dynamic resource scaling across public and private clouds, optimizing performance during peak demand and maintaining control over sensitive data.
- Security and compliance advantages: Hybrid cloud achieves a balance by keeping sensitive data in a secure private cloud, meeting compliance requirements, and offloading non-sensitive workloads to the public cloud, mitigating security risks.
- Optimized cost efficiency: Hybrid clouds optimize costs by allocating workloads strategically; cost-effective public cloud services for non-sensitive tasks and potentially cost-efficient private clouds for mission-critical applications. Ability to balance capital expenditures with operational expenditures, this could be true with both public cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
- Disaster recovery and business continuity: The hybrid cloud model enhances disaster recovery by replicating critical data across public and private clouds, enabling seamless switching between environments to ensure uninterrupted business operations.
- Improved performance and reduced latency: Hybrid cloud architecture optimizes performance by placing latency-sensitive applications in a private cloud for proximity to end-users, while less sensitive workloads leverage the global infrastructure of public cloud providers, resulting in enhanced user experience.
- Vendor diversification/avoid vendor lock-in: Ability to use multiple public cloud and on-premises infrastructure vendors empower enterprises to reduce dependency on a single vendor.
How does hybrid cloud work?
By combining private and public cloud environments, the hybrid cloud creates a unified system that enables businesses to customize their IT strategy. This unified system ensures Interoperability and seamless communication between the two cloud types by middleware, networking technologies, and APIs. The distribution of workloads is done strategically; scalable tasks, like as web applications or testing, benefit from of the flexibility of public clouds, while sensitive or compliance-heavy workloads reside in private clouds for superior control and security. Businesses can adapt as demands shift when workloads can be relocated between environments in a dynamic manner.
Centralized management solutions are essential because they offer a single view of both clouds and make data management, application deployment, and resource scalability easier. These procedures are further streamlined by orchestration tools, which simplify and manage complicated tasks. While APIs maintain seamless workflows for tasks like analytics, disaster recovery, or multi-cloud operations, data synchronization ensures that information is consistent across environments, whether through replication or real-time pipelines. Fast, secure communication between the clouds is ensured by networking solutions like VPNs, SD-WAN, and direct connections like AWS Direct Connect or Azure ExpressRoute.
For hybrid cloud setups, security features are essential. Encryption safeguards data both in transit and at rest, Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions control access, and compliance procedures guarantee that sensitive data remains in private clouds when required. A notable characteristic of hybrid cloud computing is its scalability, which is demonstrated by "cloud bursting," in which workloads are moved to the public cloud to accommodate spikes in demand. For instance, while crucial functions continue to run in the private cloud, the public cloud can handle spikes in traffic during an e-commerce sale event.
By combining secure networking, centralized control, data synchronization, and task mobility into a single flexible system, this design provides flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. It enables companies to remain adaptable to shifting demands while optimizing their IT resources.
What are the best practices for hybrid cloud implementation?
Implementing Hybrid cloud: Best practices
- Effective integration & orchestration: Ensure smooth communication between public and private components with automated orchestration tools.
- Workload prioritization: Distribute workloads based on sensitivity, compliance needs, and cost considerations.
- Secure hybrid networking: Establish low-latency connections between cloud environments for seamless data transfer.
- Data synchronization & consistency: Ensure real-time updates and consistent data access across all environments.
What hybrid cloud solutions and services does HPE offer?
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) delivers a comprehensive range of hybrid cloud solutions designed to provide a seamless cloud experience for applications and data, regardless of whether they reside in data centers, at the edge, or in public clouds. The foundation of HPE’s hybrid cloud strategy is the HPE GreenLake Cloud, which is hybrid cloud platform that serves as its flagship offering.
HPE is uniquely positioned to help enterprises speed time to value with AI, address the exploding costs of public cloud and virtualized workloads, and inject greater agility into IT to better respond to business and workload needs with our unique Hybrid Cloud vision and our innovative HPE GreenLake cloud portfolio.
HPE offers a full private cloud portfolio optimized for traditional, cloud-native, and AI workloads. These engineered systems are pre-integrated, and workload optimized and enable customers to quickly recognize value - day zero, day one, day 2 and beyond.
- ideal for virtualization, edge, GenAI, mission-critical apps, and more, all while maintaining enterprise-grade governance and control.
Building on this, we provide a unified data platform, built for AI, that makes it easy for enterprises to access and manage their data from edge to cloud.
In addition, HPE offers unified hybrid cloud operations, giving customers the same management experience for their entire IT estate.
With HPE GreenLake cloud, a full hybrid cloud stack enables you to:
- Be more agile and efficient without relinquishing control.
- Have total flexibility and portability to place workloads and data for the best blend of cost, performance and security, not dictated by vendor-defined boundaries.
- Empower your innovators as you protect and manage your data, regardless of location.
- Focus more on innovation and less time on infrastructure.
- Accelerate AI initiative ROI.
- Reduce overall skill needs by standardizing and automating your processes, to do more with less, faster.
Key HPE Hybrid Cloud Solutions:
1. HPE GreenLake
HPE GreenLake is a unified, scalable platform offering cloud services and a consistent experience across hybrid environments.
- Pay-Per-Use Model: Customers pay only for the resources they consume, ensuring financial flexibility akin to public cloud models.
- Simplified Operations: A unified control plane streamlines IT operations across private and public clouds.
- Broad Cloud Services: GreenLake supports diverse workloads, including AI, machine learning, analytics, private cloud, storage, compute, networking, and data protection.
2. HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software
HPE Morpheus, acquired by HPE, is a robust hybrid cloud management platform.
- Unified Management: Centralized management of virtual machines (VMs), containers, and bare-metal workloads across on-premises, edge, and public cloud environments.
- Self-Service Provisioning: Enables developers to access resources on demand via a self-service catalog.
- Governance and Cost Optimization: Offers policy-based governance, role-based access control, and tools for visibility and cost management.
- HPE Morpheus VM Essentials: A cost-effective virtualization solution managed through Morpheus, providing an alternative to traditional hypervisors and reducing licensing costs.
3. HPE Private Cloud Solutions
HPE delivers private cloud solutions integrated with GreenLake and Morpheus software.
- GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition: Provides on-demand VM provisioning across hybrid clouds, offering a self-service private cloud experience.
- GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise: A fully managed solution for bare metal, containers, and VMs, ideal for modernizing legacy IT infrastructure.
- Disaggregated Hyperconverged Infrastructure (dHCI): Enables independent scaling of compute and storage resources for greater flexibility.
4. HPE OpsRamp Software
OpsRamp enhances HPE’s hybrid cloud capabilities with AI-powered IT operations management (AIOps).
- Observability: Offers visibility across multi-cloud and multi-vendor environments.
- Automation: Streamlines IT processes, improving efficiency and reducing operational overhead.
5. Infrastructure Solutions
HPE’s hybrid cloud strategy is supported by its hardware and software portfolio.
- Storage: Solutions like HPE Alletra Storage MP deliver enterprise-class storage as a service, simplifying data management.
- Compute: HPE ProLiant servers provide robust compute power for hybrid environments.
- Networking: HPE Aruba Networking solutions enable secure, intelligent networking, with options like Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) available through GreenLake.
6. Hybrid Cloud Services
HPE complements its technology offerings with comprehensive services to support customers’ hybrid cloud adoption:
- Advisory and Professional Services: Assisting with strategy, design, implementation, and migration to hybrid cloud.
- Managed Services: Providing ongoing management and optimization of hybrid environments.
In an era where agility, scalability, and intelligent operations are paramount, HPE stands out as a trusted partner for hybrid cloud transformation and AI innovation. Through its innovative GreenLake platform, integrated private cloud solutions, advanced management tools like Morpheus and OpsRamp, and a full spectrum of infrastructure and services, HPE empowers organizations to modernize IT, optimize costs, and accelerate innovation—from edge to cloud. With HPE, enterprises can confidently navigate the complexities of hybrid cloud and unlock the full potential of their data and workloads.