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.
Time to read: 5 minutes 30 seconds | Updated: February 5, 2026
Table of Contents
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:
GreenLake for Compute Ops Management: Offload the management of your hybrid cloud infrastructure with ongoing support services. 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.
HPE Zerto Software: Enhance disaster recovery and streamline IT operations with HPE Zerto Software workload mobility.
OpsRamp, a Hewlett Packard Company: OpsRamp's unified monitoring and automation platform.
- Data management and analytics:
HPE Data Fabric Software: Unify your data across the hybrid cloud with HPE Data Fabric Software, 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.
FAQs
What is the first step in building hybrid cloud infrastructure?
Most applications can benefit from a hybrid cloud infrastructure design. Start by reviewing your current applications and data. Assess how they perform, how secure they are, and what compliance rules they need to follow. This will help you decide which workloads belong in the public cloud and which should remain on your private systems. Your findings will guide the rest of your hybrid cloud planning.
What is a "unified control plane" for hybrid infrastructure?
A unified control plane is a management tool that gives you a single place to manage both private and public cloud resources. With it, you can deploy services, set governance rules, and track performance across your entire hybrid environment from a single dashboard. This makes operations easier and less complicated.
What is the role of networking in hybrid cloud infrastructure?
Networking is the key connection between private data centers and public clouds. Secure, high-speed links, such as VPNs or dedicated interconnects, enable data and applications to move smoothly and reliably. If the network is slow or unreliable, the benefits of a hybrid setup are greatly reduced.
How do you manage costs across hybrid infrastructure?
To manage costs effectively, it’s important to consider both on-premises (CapEx) and public cloud (OpEx) expenses together. Using a central platform to track usage, follow FinOps practices, and place workloads wisely can help keep costs under control. This way, you can avoid surprise charges and optimize resource use.
How does hybrid cloud infrastructure support legacy applications?
Hybrid infrastructure is a great way to modernize while keeping your legacy applications. You can continue running stable, monolithic systems on your existing hardware and build new cloud-native services in the public cloud. These new services connect securely to your legacy systems, so you can add new features without the risks of full migration.
Is hybrid cloud infrastructure just a mix of old and new hardware?
Hybrid infrastructure uses software and a unified operating model to combine private and public resources into a single, flexible system. This setup enables consistent management, automated workflows, and easy movement of workloads between environments, regardless of the hardware used.
How do you measure success for hybrid cloud infrastructure?
Hybrid cloud infrastructure success is measured by the seamless integration of legacy and cloud-native apps, reliable performance, secure connectivity, efficient cost management, scalability, and compliance. KPIs include system uptime, latency, secure connections, cost tracking, scalability metrics, audit results, automation rates, and positive stakeholder feedback.