Hybrid Cloud

Enterprises use hybrid cloud for the following reasons:

• Optimizing workload: Hybrid cloud offers the flexibility to run critical workloads on dedicated infrastructure for security and compliance.
• Resource scalability: Businesses can scale resources up or down based on demand. This helps them utilize the existing resources during increased workloads without spending additional money to buy new resources and prevent underutilization during regular hours.
• Business continuity: The hybrid cloud replicates the data and application between private and public clouds to ensure business continuity during system failures or outages.
• Low cost: Businesses can choose affordable infrastructure for different workloads. Also, the pay-as-you-go model is an excellent way to optimize costs.

Hybrid cloud environments face many challenges which businesses must address to prevent data breaches and severe negative outcomes. Planning strategically and implementing the right measures to avoid these challenges is essential.

• Security: Maintaining the privacy of all the information stored on the cloud is essential. Irrespective of the fact that cloud service companies assure data integrity, it is critical to have strict security controls to prevent data breaches, keep an eye on access management, and follow compliance standards with the help of data encryption techniques and monitoring access controls. Some common attacks include malware attacks and identity thefts; these can lead to potential losses in terms of money and reputation.
• Networking: Hybrid cloud environments face challenges such as the complexity of network configuration, bandwidth limitations, and network latency. Establishing efficient connections between the on-cloud and on-premises cloud environments is sometimes difficult through VPN connections or leased lines. Also, implementing security techniques such as encryption, intrusion detection systems, and firewalls sometimes becomes daunting. It is essential to have adequate bandwidth and lower the latency to facilitate data transfer between the cloud environments.
• Cost: While transferring large amounts of data between different cloud environments, businesses may face additional costs, which include the fee charged by service providers or optimization of data migration strategies to lower costs. Also, businesses need different software solutions and licenses, which may result in extra costs if they are not managed properly. Some other costs include operations costs (monitoring, management, and support), vendor lock-in costs (working with different cloud service vendors), and hybrid cloud infrastructure costs (software, hardware, and networking equipment).
• Observability: provides the ability to measure a system’s current state based on the data it generates. It provides a thorough understanding of the distributed system by examining all the inputs available. Unlike cloud monitoring solutions that use dashboards to display performance indicators so IT teams can find and fix problems, observability platforms use logs, traces, and metrics gathered from your entire infrastructure to alert you of potential problems before they even arise.  While observability is a powerful tool for cloud native architectures, it’s not without its limitations. Dynamic, multi-cloud environments are increasingly complex, and many legacy observability platforms have a hard time connecting correlation to causations, and realizing which actions, features, apps, and experiences drive business impacts. Siloed infra, dev, ops, and business teams cause many key insights to become lost or come to the surface too late.
• Load balancing:  Cloud workload balancing distributes workloads across computing environments, balancing the network traffic accessing each of them. Organizational workload demands can be met by routing incoming traffic to multiple servers, networks, or other resources. At the same time load balancing can improve performance and protect against disruptions in service provision. Not only does workload or load balancing distribute service demands between platforms, but it can also distribute them across multiple geographies. Cloud-based load balancing can improve performance and lower cost by taking advantage of hybrid cloud-based scalability, availability, and agility to meet distributed workload demands.
• Data accessibility: Cloud, and by extension hybrid cloud environments have a requirement to provide data protection. Data accessibility to the right users is the focus of security and protection policies, particularly when data is distributed across multiple cloud platforms and locations. A hybrid cloud increases the risks of experiencing a significant data breach within its ecosystem, though on the other hand providing access to user groups is required to engender productivity and growth for the organization. Providing access as widely as possible while maintaining robust security, privacy, and compliance is the equation facing security, CloudOps, and DevSecOps teams.
• Multi-cloud ITOps:  The role of ITOps in a multi-cloud environment differs from traditional techniques and methodologies in traditional on-premises environments. In a hybrid cloud, the focus needs to be streamlining and automating management tasks. As the goal of ITOps is to provide a high-performing and consistent IT environment it has to address the growing workload shifted to cloud platforms, where complexity increases and is linked to legacy on-premises environments. ITOps functions focus on the management of workload performance of key applications, core system functionality and reliability, and overall performance through change configuration automation. In many organizations, depending on the depth of adoption of the hybrid cloud, ITOps teams are evolving into CloudOps teams that integrate DevOps and security departments.