You’re likely to hear more and more about the Hybrid Cloud for a variety of reasons. Technologies are now massively developed in the Cloud, and services and applications need to be accessible anytime and anywhere, meaning a secure and agile IT infrastructure is essential.
The Hybrid Cloud is proving to be an ally of choice for companies as it meets their needs in terms of flexibility, performance and security.
How does the Hybrid Cloud enable companies to meet these challenges?
First of all, we should look at the definition of Hybrid Cloud to better understand how it works. Hybrid Cloud connects a company’s public* cloud to its private** cloud and combines on-site (dedicated) and off-site (shared platforms) IT resources, creating a hybrid environment connected by standard or proprietary technology. Organisations can then leverage the power and benefits of each of these services.
For example, the Hybrid Cloud enables the Public Cloud to be used when a business is experiencing peaks in activity due to seasonality, economic changes or other factors. It can then transfer workloads from its private Cloud to a public Cloud, which are always ready to receive data and offer additional computing capacity.
The company can keep its sensitive data and applications and demanding service level agreements (SLAs) in its private Cloud, ensuring security, and transfer less critical additional workloads to a public Cloud.
This combination is also attractive from an economic point of view. By using the resources of one or more public Clouds as needed, the company only pays for what it consumes, therefore avoiding the fixed costs associated with increasing its private Cloud’s capacity.
Orchestrating the Private Cloud and Public Cloud
Though the Hybrid Cloud’s benefits are well understood, there can be questions about its implementation. While it seems logical to use the services of both types of Cloud, upstream planning is essential with regards to the orchestration of data transfer between these two spheres, access to telecom operators and Internet Service Providers (ISPs), connectivity, API compatibility, and so on.
That is why DATA4 has set up a D4 Hub Cloud service offering with the sole aim of helping companies hybridise their IT.
Through this platform, companies can build their hybrid IT environment themselves, selecting the services they need, when they need them. They can easily extend their private Clouds to public Clouds thanks to direct and secure links with controlled latency and jitter, available from all the DATA4 campuses in France and Europe.
D4 Digital Hub also provides direct access to more than 70 telecom operators, major European Internet exchange nodes, ISPs and partner services such as storage on demand and HPC (High Performance Computing) in case of a cloud burst, which is the configuration established between a private and a public cloud to manage peaks in IT demand***.
Flexible, fast, secure and cost-effective, the Hybrid Cloud is attracting more and more companies wanting to modernise their infrastructures. So, don’t you think it’s time to rethink your IT strategy and get started?
* If you use a public cloud, servers are shared by the provider’s various customers and are off site.
** If you are using a private cloud, that means the servers are dedicated to your company alone. They can be on site or elsewhere.
*** In cloud computing, cloud bursting is a configuration established between a private cloud and a public cloud to manage peaks in computing demand. If a company using a private cloud reaches 100% of its resource capacity, excess traffic is directed to a public cloud to avoid service disruption.
