Hybrid Cloud Becomes Mainstream
Hybrid cloud offers the flexibility to deploy each workload as it makes the most sense, granting access to the best of both public and private cloud.
Public and private cloud infrastructure each have their strengths and weaknesses, and no single choice made at the enterprise level will be best for all applications. Rather, on a workload by workload basis, public or private cloud infrastructure will make more sense.
The preferability of public or private cloud infrastructure depends on the nature of the application’s use case. Use cases requiring that a higher priority be given to security over access to a broad ecosystem tend to choose private cloud over public, and those favoring ecosystem access tend to go the opposite.
Once this situation posed a problem for enterprises forced to choose one architecture for all applications, but today’s hybrid cloud environments have made this dilemma a thing of the past. By employing hybrid cloud IaaS, the enterprise can take advantage of the best qualities of each architecture while mitigating its disadvantages. Hybrid cloud can give an enterprise the security, control, and cost predictability it seeks for certain applications and the flexibility, tooling, analytics, and ecosystem it seeks for others.
For example, financial institutions perform many operations of an extremely sensitive nature for which security is paramount, such as those including customers’ financial data. For these applications security becomes the primary requirement. However, these institutions also have low-security applications such as presenting public-facing web content or running outbound marketing programs. For this second set of applications ecosystem support is likely to be more important. These institutions may favor private cloud for the first set of applications and public cloud for the second. In this scenario, a hybrid cloud solution may be a good fit for the enterprise’s total set of needs without encouraging the proliferation of platforms and vendors.
Offering both architectures in a single, integrated environment enables managers to easily choose the right architecture for each application and to coordinate management of the entire system through a single control point. For these reasons, IDC predicts that over 80% of IT organizations will be committed to hybrid infrastructure strategy by 2018.
