Hybrid cloud infrastructure

What is 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.

HPE-outlined hybrid cloud infrastructure challenges and considerations:

• Complexity: Integrating and orchestrating workloads across diverse infrastructures with different tools and technologies can make managing a hybrid cloud system challenging.
• Security and compliance: Maintaining uniform rules and data privacy across cloud infrastructures is challenging.
• Organizations risk vendor lock-in by relying on certain cloud providers without considering resource options. This may reduce flexibility and raise expenses.
• IT workers with knowledge in both on-premises and cloud technologies are needed to implement and manage a hybrid cloud architecture.
• 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.

• 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 economical 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.