With extensive growth of different data forms and evolving requirements of a more mobile workspace, it’s tough than ever to put workloads into right groupings or opt a single cloud model. Hybrid cloud is the best of existing cloud models – private, public, community, on-site, off-site, managed – while taking advantage of current IT infrastructures.
With a robust hybrid cloud solution, cloud services grow when you integrate two or more clouds that stay as unique entities but are operated together virtually to develop a seamless, more significant cloud environment. Provided that level of freedom, analyst firm Gartner said,“More than 70 percent of all companies plan to opt a hybrid cloud strategy by next year.”
This post is all about the hybrid cloud and guides you about the ways through which you can optimize your network for the Hybrid cloud.
Turning a hybrid from challenge to opportunity
As per a recent stats,“44% of business cloud decision makers think cloud computing is a bit complex, and a hybrid cloud might increase this number.” But a thoughtful plan, an experienced partner, and an intentional technology can make it easy, turning a hybrid challenge into a hybrid competitive advantage. You can even take training like AWS training to achieve this.
Consider you have in-house systems of record like an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application that stores all credit card data of customers. On a public cloud, you may have a mobile application that customers accesses or marketing leverages to understand buyer behaviour in a better way. Simultaneously, IT is offering a private cloud infrastructure as a service to a developer team to develop new promotional features that recommend products on the basis of customers’ data.
With the help of a hybrid cloud model that not only dives into, but bridges, clouds, businesses are able to reinvent their services and processes speedily using content and skills from any source, and consistently adapt to stay competitive.
Enterprises can set up cloud environments faster for innovation and integrate new capabilities, such as analytics, and then shift back on-site. Or keep some parts of an application in the data center, but send the remaining to a service provider’s cloud.
Why Hybrid Cloud is essential to the business
- Regarding IT, enterprises today perform at high speeds. To solve the challenges of competition and the growing marketplace, enterprises have to be agile and innovative, especially for mobile and web applications that customers use. At the same time, the stable systems and processes that keep the companies running cannot be replaced quickly and therefore grow at a slower pace. You can call it two speed IT. The first part, the fixed speed, provides enterprise-strength IT services, and the other part, high speed, allows exploitation of various digital business opportunities. Nevertheless, results come via optimizing support for both IT types. Hybrid cloud provides a solution to this requirement.
- Enables a highly cost-effective, rapidly responsive and elastic IT, better aligned with the business needs in order to support two speed IT.
- A hybrid cloud is designed for high consumption, better interconnection, orchestration, and management of all types of cloud services. Hybrid cloud leads to a highly responsive and elastic IT that can speedily respond to the needs and demands of both continuous speed systems of record (SoR) and the faster speed systems of engagement (SoE). Workloads are enabled via automation and programmable IT with open infrastructure APIs and infrastructure services.
- Provided a portfolio of business and IT services that leverage the potential of cloud service providers, improving flexibility in what can be created and where it can be deployed.
- Utilizing cloud services offers new tools and data for innovation. Now, the businesses are not constrained by what they have on-site. In essence, the “archive of services” that they have at their disposal rises significantly.
- Helps the enterprises to innovate quickly while leveraging current systems and capabilities.
Simply put it comes down to money and money. The ability to compose services from both onsite and offsite (i.e., hybrid) is an important factor to accelerate delivery to market and to minimize costs.
Incorporate automation
Now, new technologies help you to automate how you deploy, develop, and manage your infrastructure. This can be scaled from within your data center and the way out to your cloud. You can reach the automation layer in a few ways. You have got cloud-layer automation with technologies like OpenStack and Eucalyptus while infrastructure automation with tools like Chef and Puppet Labs.
The important point is that you can start to create powerful automation scripts and policies to manage every aspect of your cloud platform. You can foster a proactive environment where resources are optimized, and workloads are dynamically controlled. All the while – your executives can focus on refining your overall platform.
Consider a direct connection
In order to avoid potential security issues, some businesses choose to deploy a direct connection between themselves and their selected cloud provider; such as direct connections, are particularly provided by a telecommunications provider. To simplify things, most of the major cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and VMware have provided these types of private connections via a partnership with a national provider.
An alternative is an Internet Exchange Point, the faster link between the two independent networks. Redundancy should not be ignored in network topology, and the hybrid cloud is the same. Whether you select to connect to your cloud resources with the help of your ISP’s connection or a dedicated connection, you should fix the second connection as well. You may also get a VPN connection from your cloud service provider that can be used as a backup link in case of failure.
Software-defined technologies to the rescue
There are few real use-cases for software-defined technologies. Now, you can abstract physical resources at the network, compute, storage, and even data center layer. For instance, Atlantis USX unites policy-dependent controls for storage resource pointed to the all virtual appliances. Right from there, the platform pools speed up and optimize current SAN, NAS, RAM and other types of DAS (SSD, Flash, SAS). What more advantageous is that you can include automation policies and enable these optimizations to extend into your hybrid cloud architecture.
VMware has taken the software-defined conversation to another level. Their platform integrates storage, network, and control all under one control layer. Now, all these control mechanisms can extend into a VMware Hybrid Cloud architecture.
About InterPole
InterPole was established in 1996 and has been engaged in web hosting, email, and management of IT infrastructure. InterPole pioneered with Virtual Private Servers in 2004 and Cloud Hosting in 2008. Over the years, InterPole has worked with over 6200 mid-sized businesses and startups, and have assisted them in their journey towards the adoption of modern technologies through the Internet. InterPole is a Standard Consulting Partner of Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. With this partnership, provides Managed AWS service and maintains a team of engineers who are trained and certified for the specific cloud platforms. These benefits companies in defining their cloud strategy and making a well-planned journey, reliably and cost-effectively.