Designing and Building a Hybrid Cloud

Chapter 2. Understanding the Hybrid Cloud

While many have suggested that hybrid cloud is only a waypoint on the road to full public cloud adoption, hybrid cloud is fast becoming the dominant enterprise IT operating model; hybrid cloud adoption grew 3X from 2016 to 2017. This chapter explores hybrid cloud benefits and explains why it is the preferred model. It also provides a prescription for creating a mature hybrid cloud.

What Are the Benefits of Hybrid Cloud?

If the hybrid cloud is going to be such an important part of your future, what should your business hope to gain? The hybrid model offers many potential benefits:

Flexibility and agility

By far the most important benefit of a properly architected hybrid cloud is increased business agility. You have ready access to resources to support new applications, accommodate development and testing projects, or to quickly address unanticipated needs. In an ideal world, workloads can be moved quickly between on-premises and cloud locations, and leverage resources from multiple locations. (Unfortunately, API and architectural differences between different cloud providers make this challenging.)

Elasticity

Many industries experience big variations in resource demand. One clear example is retail, where activity spikes before the December holidays. The hybrid cloud model gives you the ability to respond elastically to resource demands. In a similar vein, many individual applications have big fluctuations in resource demand. Such applications ...