Hybrid cloud infrastructure What is hybrid cloud infrastructure?
Hybrid cloud infrastructure combines public, private, and on-premises data centers to fulfill IT requirements. It allows to manage and migrate workloads across multiple infrastructures to improve efficiency, cost, and digital transformation.
- Hybrid cloud infrastructure benefits
- Hybrid cloud infrastructure best practices
- Hybrid cloud infrastructure challenges
- Hybrid cloud Infrastructure use cases and examples
- HPE and hybrid cloud infrastructure
What are the benefits of hybrid cloud infrastructure?
- Security and compliance: Hybrid cloud lets enterprises preserve sensitive data in a secure private cloud while using the public cloud for less important tasks. This is especially useful for firms with strong data protection rules.
- Scalability and cost efficiency: By operating core apps on their on-premises infrastructure or private cloud, businesses may use the public cloud's practically infinite scalability to address unexpected demand surges while reducing operational expenses.
- Flexible and agility: The hybrid cloud approach gives enterprises more IT resource deployment and management options. Based on workload demands, they can pick public, private, or on-premises environments. This makes firms more adaptable to market changes.
- Improved disaster recovery: By duplicating data and apps between private and public clouds, enterprises may maintain business continuity after a system failure.
- Improved performance: Hybrid cloud lets enterprises use the public cloud for high-performance computing and data-intensive tasks while keeping low-latency on-premises resources.
Best practices for 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.
Challenges and considerations in hybrid cloud infrastructure
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.
Use cases and example of hybrid cloud infrastructure
- 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.
How HPE helps you in hybrid cloud infrastructure
Empowering your hybrid cloud Journey with HPE
HPE provides a comprehensive set of services and solutions tailored to suit your hybrid cloud journey:
- Planning and strategy:
- HPE Transformation Services: HPE's consulting prowess crafts a bespoke hybrid cloud strategy aligned with your business objectives. Benefit from expert assessment, workload placement insights, and a roadmap for seamless implementation.
- Migration and optimization:
- Private cloud: Simplify infrastructure with a pay-as-you-go private cloud solution, offering enterprise and business editions for flexibility and control. Enjoy cloud-like agility while retaining data sovereignty.
- HPE Accelerated Migration Services: Use HPE's proven methodologies to seamlessly migrate workloads to your hybrid cloud environment with minimal disruption.
- Management and operations:
- HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management: Offload the management of your hybrid cloud infrastructure with ongoing support services. HPE GreenLake handles monitoring and optimization for you.
- Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Company: Enhance disaster recovery and streamline IT operations with Zerto's workload mobility.
- OpsRamp, a Hewlett Packard Company: OpsRamp's unified monitoring and automation platform.
- Data management and analytics:
- HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Software: Unify your data across the hybrid cloud with HPE Ezmeral, simplifying management, governance, and analytics for valuable insights from all sources.
- Application modernization:
- HPE Application Modernization Services: Transform legacy applications for hybrid cloud readiness, optimizing performance, scalability, and agility.
