Hybrid and Multicloud Solutions

Chapter 1. Understanding the Hybrid Cloud

The datacenter has undergone fundamental changes over the past 10 years. Virtualization technology enables organizations to create internal private clouds, speeding up delivery of software projects. In many cases, public cloud providers provide a viable substitute for local data, and in other cases, public cloud providers supplement the private cloud.

As the world moves to the cloud, organizations are increasingly looking for ways to take advantage of their investment in private clouds for a competitive advantage. This advantage can be achieved by combining public and private cloud technologies to create a hybrid cloud.

This chapter examines the hybrid cloud, beginning with some basic vocabulary and continuing with use cases for the hybrid cloud.

What Is a Hybrid Cloud?

A hybrid cloud is a combination of one or more public cloud providers (like Amazon Web Services [AWS], Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform [GCP]) and a private cloud platform (hosted on-premises for use by a single organization) or private IT infrastructure. The public cloud and private infrastructure are distinct and independent elements that communicate over an encrypted connection. This enables organizations to store secure data in their own datacenter while using computational resources from the public cloud to run applications that rely on this data.

Many organizations use a combination of resources from both external providers and internal IT-based hardware ...