Moving to a Hybrid Cloud Brings Big Benefits

Small businesses have been leaning on cloud computing for a few years now as it presents a lot of options to compete without having to make huge--often unavailable--capital investments in their information systems. Public cloud computing can provide any business with value, but what happens when it absolutely has to ensure that certain data stays secure, but accessible? 

Traditionally, companies would bite the bullet and buy their own onsite infrastructure and monitor it constantly and force users to connect to it via a local-area network (LAN). This cut down on the accessibility of the data, as people would have to connect directly into the LAN for access. With the speed at which business moves today, businesses aren’t always in a position to make this traditional network setup work. The private cloud server fixed this issue.

A private cloud server is a cloud interface that has no shared resources. When companies make big capital investment in their IT and set up their own cloud platforms, they can ensure that the data is monitored, secured, and only available by people that need to have access to it--much like the LAN setup--but their employees could access the information from outside the business. 

You are seeing more and more companies make the jump to private cloud servers for sensitive data. This is how the hybrid cloud platform got started. Businesses, cognizant of the attractive cost savings some of their public cloud resources present; and, also understanding that they have resources that they need direct control over, started coming up with a strategy using both to present the most value for their needs.

The hybrid cloud offers the following benefits:

• Lower costs than a private cloud
• Better control over data than public cloud
• Improves security of sensitive information
• Able to handle more data and types of data
• Reduces energy and HVAC costs

How It Works

It’s pretty simple really. A business that already has been using public cloud resources such as G Suite or Office 365 would continue using those options. A company has more private cloud options than ever before. They can choose to host their private cloud onsite or in a dedicated data center with resources that have been provisioned specifically for their company. Since the management of this infrastructure will (by definition) be your company’s responsibility, this second option is often done in a colocation center that is designed to house enterprise data.

Once the hardware is in place, an orchestration layer is used to integrate the use of data from public and private clouds alike. This is effectively a software that provides efficient integration of all resources, while maintaining the security needed by private cloud standards. By using both options and having the data and applications “play nice”, you then have an adequate hybrid cloud platform.

This presents much more agility to your business’ centralized infrastructure. Implementation of a hybrid cloud will help if your business has frequently changing workloads or if you are attempting to implement a Big Data strategy to better understand your business. It also allows organizations that may not completely buy into cloud computing to move to hosted computing incrementally. The biggest change the hybrid cloud presents a business, however, is the ability to completely separate some less important workloads from workloads that are critical to your business while maintaining anytime, everywhere access to those resources.

If you are intrigued by the prospect of utilizing hybrid cloud technology, but have questions about it, call the experts at Computerware today at (703) 821-8200.