One of the technological innovations that has revolutionized the way people and businesses work in today’s world is Cloud Computing. With its pay-per-user model it has introduced a new concept of consumption and delivery in IT. Cloud Computing gives organizations an opportunity to enhance their productivity and gain a competitive advantage via infrastructure-free IT.
However, there are businesses which are concerned about the privacy and security of their data. They have been hesitant to move data and workloads on the cloud. Hybrid Cloud is the answer to these concerns. According to Markets and Markets the hybrid cloud market is expected to reach $92 billion in 2021. Hybrid cloud gives you the best of both the worlds- flexibility and scalability of a public cloud along with the security and control associated with on-premise infrastructure. In this kind of orchestrated architecture, public and private cloud operate independently but are integrated in such a way that it allows the flow of data and applications between them. An enterprise can host sensitive information on private cloud for which they have physical control and not-so-critical data on public cloud. For instance, most of the countries prefer to have enterprise data reside within the country for which private cloud is the best option. However, this does not restrict the application provider from having parts of their application hosted on public cloud for better performance.
On the other hand, in a multi cloud environment, different cloud services are used from different cloud vendors but are not integrated among themselves.This set-up allows enterprises to get the best of each cloud vendor as per their specific needs without depending on a single service provider. This is useful for disaster recovery. At the same time it is advantageous in terms price competitiveness. According to International journal of recent trends in engineering and research, “Organizations tend to prefer a multi-cloud strategy to get out of the ‘keeping all your eggs in one basket’ problem that can leave them vulnerable to a variety of issues, such as cloud data center outages, bandwidth problems, and vendor lock-in.” An organization uses this set-up to meet different needs of different departments, team, business functions and more. For instance, HR department may need video-conferencing service whereas the sales team may need file-sharing service.
“Initially people wanted to host workloads on a single platform – public or private. However, with multi and hybrid cloud architecture, enterprises now have lot of options to be efficient,” said Somesh Misra, VP-Product, Deskera. “These options are beneficial for enterprises so that they can get the best user experience,” he further added.
Hybrid cloud allows businesses to take care of the security of data as well as the unique demands that can be met by physical control of the set-up. It allows organizations to leverage public cloud services without giving away their entire data to a third-party data-centre. Thus providing flexibility in workload, while keeping important data in a secured environment. Multi-cloud prevents data loss or downtime due to a component failure in the cloud. Today, both these cloud approaches -Multiple and Hybrid are not mutually exclusive. You can have both of them simultaneously. In fact, it’s becoming more common across enterprises as they seek to improve security and performance through an expanded portfolio of environments.