Hybrid cloud: the best of both worlds
It’s pretty easy to jump into the cloud. Getting it right is a bit more complicated. And ensuring a working strategy that will serve well for many years is quite a challenge. The word strategy plays a crucial role here, because the digital transformation of your business is a complex process. Especially if the company has to rely on its own iron.
Analyse and plan carefully
“There’s never time to do things right, but there’s always time to fix them,” goes a winged quote that’s best avoided. That’s why it’s always a good idea to slow down, analyze the needs, and tweak the architecture to perfection. Of course, it’s best to have an experienced navigator through the world of cloud that you can rely on.
The complexity of the whole process increases when you can’t simply take everything and put it in the classic public cloud. Here comes the explanation of the term hybrid cloud. It is a combination of private cloud (or on-premises architecture) with public cloud. There may be more than one of these public cloud platforms. In this case, we are talking about multi-cloud, which we will talk more about in the future.
When to choose hybrid infrastructure?
Why is it sometimes not possible to choose a pure public cloud? This may be due to legislation. User data is subject to strict regulations, so ERP or CRM systems must only operate in on-prem/private cloud mode. Another example might be production systems or accounting. We often “want to see” sensitive data.
An obstacle may be the ownership of software licenses, whose licensing terms may not allow their application in the public cloud. These licenses are often not cheap, and using them on dedicated infrastructure is one way to avoid losing their benefits. Last but not least, hybrid cloud brings the opportunity of economic savings, where even in the case of dedicated server infrastructure you do not have to buy physical servers for your own ownership.
As we wrote in a previous article, send everything that doesn’t necessarily need to run at your location to the cloud. Diversify. This applies to websites or mobile applications where high availability and scalability are a concern. Another example is big data and machine learning. That is, workloads that can benefit from the enormous computing capacity of the public cloud.
Flawless conductor and good connectivity
Or how do we manage it all? In a hybrid cloud environment, an organization has a mix of on-premise/private cloud and public cloud resources. VMware is a suitable solution for running cloud environments, with a wide range of tools that give you full control and visibility of your environment.
Last but not least, it is also necessary to think about the quality of the entire infrastructure connection. With respect to speed and security, it is certainly a good idea to consider the capabilities of a dedicated line, such as its sufficient bandwidth and possible backup to ensure redundancy in the event of an outage. Within the Geetoo Public Cloud and Geetoo Private Cloud interconnection, for example, the internal interconnection consists of up to 10 Gbps, which is always secured by redundant network elements.
The philosophy of hybrid cloud is to achieve a state that is optimal in terms of security, geographic availability, optimization of HW and SW license costs and that brings a zen-like balance between these milestones.
Tomáš Jeníkovský, Geetoo pre-sales representative
For & against
Hybrid cloud enables companies to achieve significant savings in staffing and hardware refresh costs. It is the right choice if the company has to comply with legislative regulations (data sovereignty, GDPR…). Hybrid infrastructure also provides greater availability and flexibility.
Its disadvantages are greater complexity of the whole solution, longer implementation and higher risk of configuration errors. All this can be easily solved if you put yourself in the hands of a reliable cloud solution expert.
