Enterprise hybrid cloud What is hybrid cloud?
What is hybrid cloud?
Hybrid cloud is a computing environment that combines private (on-premises data center) and public cloud. This integration allows data and applications to move seamlessly between the two, offering enhanced flexibility, scalability, cost efficiency, and security.
By leveraging the extensive resources of public clouds while maintaining control over sensitive data in private clouds, enterprise hybrid clouds provide a scalable solution that can adapt to changing business needs. Additionally, the ability to balance the use of on-premises and public cloud resources helps optimize costs.
Enterprise Hybrid cloud deployments often utilize virtualization, containerization, storage tools, and software-defined networking to access and manage resources. This approach enables businesses to migrate applications quickly and meet regulatory compliance requirements.
To ensure effective connectivity between on-premises data centers and cloud environments, enterprise hybrid cloud networking is essential. This involves using technologies such as LAN, WAN, VPN, and APIs to establish reliable communication channels.
- What's the size of the hybrid cloud market & how fast is it growing (2024-2029)?
- What are the components of a hybrid cloud?
- Why do enterprises use the hybrid cloud?
- What are the benefits of hybrid cloud?
- What are the challenges of a hybrid cloud?
- How does a hybrid cloud environment work?
- How to Implement hybrid cloud?
- What hybrid cloud solutions and services does HPE offer?
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What's the size of the hybrid cloud market & how fast is it growing (2024-2029)?
- The hybrid cloud market is projected to grow from USD 129.68 billion in 2024 to USD 352.28 billion by 2029, at a CAGR of 22.12%.
- Asia Pacific is the fastest-growing market, while North America holds the largest market share.
- Major players include Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Company, Amazon Web Services, Accenture PLC, and IBM Corporation.
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 model 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.
- 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, cloud jobs and essential task workloads are taken care of in a fraction of the time, boosting business efficiency and productivity.
Why do enterprises use the 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.
What are the benefits of hybrid cloud?
- Enhanced flexibility and scalability: Hybrid cloud allows 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.
- 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.
What are the challenges of a hybrid cloud?
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 must 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.
How does a hybrid cloud environment work?
Businesses use hybrid cloud services by mixing local, on-premises resources with private cloud and third-party public cloud services. An organization splits instrumentation between the three so workloads can move between the public and private cloud platforms as computing needs change.
Fundamentally, a hybrid cloud model works by sharing information between onsite and offsite platforms. Interconnectivity between the platforms is achieved first through data virtualization followed by connective tools and protocols such as APIs (application programming interfaces), VPNs (virtual private networks), and/or WANs (wide area networks).
But the process of managing a hybrid cloud model is much more than merely lifting and shifting applications into the cloud. An IT department also needs to configure resources to enable them to communicate. In addition, there’s the time needed to train users and ensure both successful deployment and maintenance over the long haul that add to the investment.
As such a resource-heavy project, switching to hybrid cloud computing should be carefully considered. While this mixed environment provides businesses with greater flexibility and more data deployment options, it can mean IT departments will struggle to handle the increased complexity.
How to Implement hybrid cloud?
- Techniques for integration and orchestration: Public and private components must be seamlessly integrated using effective orchestration methods to implement a hybrid cloud. This guarantees uniform administration and communication across various cloud environments.
- Best practices for workload management: To ensure successful hybrid cloud implementation, best practices for workload management must be followed. This involves prioritizing tasks based on sensitivity and criticality, optimizing resource utilization, and ensuring efficient scalability across public and private clouds.
- Hybrid networking strategies: These are effective when on-premises infrastructure is seamlessly integrated with public and private clouds. This integration ensures optimal data transfer and network architecture for seamless communication.
- Data synchronization and consistency: These are crucial for real-time updates and smooth access to information across hybrid environments. Achieving this requires careful planning and implementation, regardless of the cloud location.
What hybrid cloud solutions and services does HPE offer?
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) offers a range of solutions and services that align with hybrid cloud strategies, providing organizations with flexibility, scalability, and efficient IT infrastructure management. Here's an overview of some key offerings:
- HPE GreenLake: HPE GreenLake is a suite of cloud services that enables organizations to consume IT resources on a pay-as-you-go model while maintaining control over on-premises infrastructure. It spans a variety of solutions, providing a flexible and scalable approach to hybrid cloud adoption.
- OpsRamp: OpsRamp, a company acquired by HPE, specializes in digital operations management. It helps organizations monitor, manage, and optimize their hybrid IT infrastructure by providing a unified infrastructure and application monitoring, automation, and service management platform.
- HPE Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework: The framework gives you a structure and common language to understand where you are in your hybrid cloud journey, helps you benchmark against best practice, and prioritize the right next steps for your organization.
- HPE Right Mix Advisor: An approach to determine strategy for your application modernization program together with identifying the right mix of your hybrid cloud platforms based on organizational objectives, latency, security, sovereignty, cost and more.
- HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition: This offering provides businesses with a simplified private cloud solution. It delivers infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with a pay-as-you-go model, allowing organizations to scale resources based on demand without overprovisioning.
- HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise:Tailored for larger enterprises, this solution extends the benefits of HPE GreenLake to provide a comprehensive private cloud environment. It includes advanced capabilities for managing complex workloads and ensuring performance at scale.
- HPE Accelerated Migration: Accelerated Migration is a service offering that facilitates the smooth transition of workloads to hybrid cloud environments. It combines expertise, automation, and best practices to accelerate migration, minimizing downtime and risks.
- HPE Edge-to-Cloud Transformation Program: This program focuses on enabling organizations to leverage the power of edge computing combined with cloud services. It provides a framework for seamlessly connecting edge devices and data to cloud infrastructure for enhanced processing and analytics.
- HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric: Part of the HPE Ezmeral container platform, the Data Fabric offers a scalable and distributed file and object storage solution. It supports data-intensive applications and facilitates data mobility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
- HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery: This solution provides a flexible and cost-effective approach to data protection. Organizations can consume backup and recovery services on a pay-as-you-go model, ensuring data resilience without the need for overprovisioned infrastructure.
- HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery: Designed for business continuity, this offering enables organizations to implement a disaster recovery solution in a cost-effective manner. It ensures the availability of critical applications and data in the event of a disruption with a consumption-based pricing model. HPE's portfolio of hybrid cloud solutions cater to various business needs, offering a mix of infrastructure, services, and management tools to support organizations in their digital transformation journey.