Hybrid cloud

What is hybrid cloud?

Hybrid cloud architecture enables the smooth movement of data and applications between different cloud environments, enhancing flexibility, scalability, cost efficiency, and security. By incorporating colocation facilities, organizations can extend their data center capabilities without the need to build or expand their own physical infrastructure, benefiting from the high levels of security,redundancy, and connectivity provided by these facilities.

Leveraging the extensive resources of public clouds while maintaining control over sensitive data in private clouds and colos, enterprise hybrid clouds provide a scalable solution that can adapt to changing business needs. The ability to balance the use of on-premises, colocation, and public cloud resources helps optimize costs and maximize efficiency. Enterprise hybrid cloud deployments often utilize virtualization, containerization, storage tools, and software-defined networking to access and manage resources effectively. This approach enables businesses to migrate applications quickly and meet regulatory compliance requirements.

To ensure effective connectivity between on-premises data centers, colocation facilities, 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. As hybrid multi-cloud has emerged as the dominant model for IT, driven by data gravity, governance and privacy needs, performance considerations, and cost, 88% of enterprise IT environments are now hybrid. HPE believe that AI is the ultimate hybrid workload, and with the increasing adoption of GenAI in the enterprise, a hybrid model for IT will become even more of a necessity.

These hybrid environments are inherently complex to manage, and that complexity is increasing due to market disruptions, most notably VMware/Broadcom price increases that create a customer urgency to modernize and diversify platforms. The integration of various components within a hybrid cloud infrastructure, including colos, ensures that organizations can navigate these complexities while achieving optimal performance and cost efficiency.

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 per-use 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.
• Colocation facilities (Colos): Third-party data centers where organizations can place their own hardware, benefiting from shared physical infrastructure like power, cooling, and connectivity while retaining control over their IT assets.
• 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, workloads distribution is taken care of, boosting business efficiency, resource optimization and productivity.
• Networking: Reliable and secure connectivity solutions, including LAN, WAN, VPN, and APIs, that facilitate communication and data transfer between on-premises data centers, private clouds, public clouds, and colocation facilities. This also encompasses software-defined networking (SDN) to efficiently manage network resources.
• Security and compliance solutions: Tools and practices designed to ensure data protection, regulatory compliance, and overall security across all components of the hybrid cloud. This includes encryption, identity and access management (IAM), and security information and event management (SIEM) systems.
• Virtualization and containerization: Technologies that abstract and isolate workloads from the underlying hardware, enabling flexible deployment and efficient resource utilization. Virtual machines (VMs) and containers (such as Docker and Kubernetes) are commonly used to streamline application deployment and scaling.
• Storage Solutions: A mix of on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid storage options that provide data persistence and management capabilities. These solutions ensure data is accessible, secure, and efficiently managed across the hybrid cloud infrastructure.
• Integration and middleware: Software that enables interoperability and seamless integration of applications and services across different environments. Middleware solutions facilitate communication between disparate systems and ensure consistent performance and functionality.

By integrating these components, a hybrid cloud environment combines the flexibility and scalability of public cloud services with the control, security, and compliance of private infrastructure. This comprehensive approach allows organizations to optimize their IT resources to effectively meet diverse business needs.

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.
• Cost efficiency: Businesses can choose affordable infrastructure for different workloads. Also, the pay-as-you-go model is an excellent way to optimize costs.
• Speed of innovation: Enterprises leverage Hybrid cloud to accelerate the rate of innovation by moving workloads off premise and leverage cloud scalability and flexibility. Gen Ai adoption plays a major role in this trend.

• Enhanced flexibility and scalability: Hybrid cloud allow 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.

Since introduction in 2018, HPE has invested in evolving the capabilities of HPE GreenLake to drive richer customer value, meet new market needs, and further differentiate vs the competition. The evolution of HPE GreenLake can be described in 3 phases:

1. Business/Financial model: By delivering IT as a service customers can reduce costs and dramatically accelerate responsiveness of on-prem IT to business needs by shortcutting capacity planning and procurement cycles, eliminating overprovisioning and only paying for what they use.

2. Cloud services: HPE introduced a cloud platform with a simplified user experience, and integrated, workload-optimized private cloud and storage solutions managed through the platform. This augmented the value of the financial model with a cloud experience to deliver greater productivity for developers and admins.

3. Hybrid cloud platform: With acquisitions of OpsRamp, Morpheus and Zerto and organic development, the value of HPE GreenLake has been extended beyond on-prem agility, to enable observability and cloud management across hybrid, multi-vendor, multi-cloud IT, reducing cost and increasing agility.

• Morpheus: Morpheus is purpose-built for managing the complexities of hybrid cloud environments, providing a unified platform to orchestrate and govern applications across a mix of on-premises infrastructure and multiple public clouds. By abstracting the underlying infrastructure differences, Morpheus allows you to manage all your resources—physical, virtual, and cloud-native—through a single dashboard. This approach simplifies hybrid cloud operations, reduces management overhead, and ensures consistent policies and procedures across your entire IT landscape. 
• Morpheus: facilitates the seamless movement of workloads between on-premises and cloud environments, a key requirement for hybrid cloud strategies. It enables easy provisioning and deployment of applications across different platforms, regardless of location. Furthermore, Morpheus offers consistent tooling and workflows for managing applications in a hybrid cloud, simplifying lifecycle management and reducing the risk of errors. By providing a unified control plane for your hybrid cloud, Morpheus empowers you to maximize the benefits of both on-premises and public cloud resources. 
• 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 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 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 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.