Top 5 Hybrid Cloud Use Cases

Featured article by John Hamner, Senior Product Manager at Hostway Services, Inc.

In some cases, it’s not enough to leverage either a private cloud or a public cloud. Many organizations have computing needs that necessitate both types of environments. For these customers, a hybrid cloud architecture is available.

Hybrid cloud refers to a custom solution utilizing the best characteristics of both public and private clouds. A hybrid cloud can ensure that all of a company’s needs are adequately addressed. In many instances, it just makes the most sense.

Let’s take a look at some of the top use cases for hybrid clouds:

1) Disaster recovery and business continuity

In the current threat environment, enterprises can’t take chances. As such, the vast majority of organizations have some sort of disaster recovery and business continuity strategy in place. When this approach includes a hybrid cloud that can extend on-premise resources into the public cloud space, it is more beneficial.

Technology solutions provider eGroup noted that many businesses simply don’t have the on-premises resources to support their disaster recovery needs. As such, these groups turn to cloud vendors to supply a repository for a disaster recovery setup.

“[Disaster Recovery as a Service] allows for flexible storage, virtual machine replication and automated failover testing, planned migrations and recovery,” eGroup stated. “It’s ideal for a hybrid cloud environment because of the deployment’s ability to handle variable capacity requirements and common disaster recovery use cases.”

2) Prevent gaps resulting from legacy technology

Information Management also pointed out that a hybrid cloud can be a valuable resource for businesses that still utilize legacy systems. In most cases, the expense associated with fully upgrading these outmoded systems is a lot for a business to take on. Instead, many companies are utilizing hybrid cloud models to cover these system gaps. Experts believe that this type of deployment will soon become more common in the large enterprise market as these businesses try to salvage their legacy applications without doing a full migration.

3) Ideal for startups

Hybrid clouds are also the perfect choice for the inconsistent startup market. Often, these firms have no idea if their offerings will fail or be wildly popular. However, decision-makers must ensure that there is capacity on hand to support either scenario. Instead of making a significant investment in on-premises systems at the project’s launch, startups can leverage a hybrid cloud architecture, keeping mission-critical data in-house while extending external-facing resources into the public cloud space.

“The risk of the new venture is far easier to justify if the capital investment is minimized and, if you hit the jackpot, the fees to the cloud service provider may seem like chicken feed compared to the new revenue being generated,” wrote Tech Republic contributor Bob Tarzey.

Later in the business’s lifecycle, administrators can invest in additional public and private cloud resources as it makes sense to do so.

4) Content delivery and edge computing

Data Center Knowledge contributor Bill Kleyman also noted that hybrid clouds are often leveraged to provide resources for content delivery when a distributed data center platform for rich content is not enough. This usage, though, is not unique to hybrid arrangements.

“Basically, you can leverage remote data center sites which help you place rich or valuable information closer to the user,” Kleyman wrote. “Utilizing the hybrid cloud model and the data delivery mechanisms behind it – you’re able to intelligently control data flow throughout your cloud.”

5) Supporting peak traffic

In some cases, a hybrid cloud can be helpful in managing traffic levels during peak usage periods. The holiday shopping season, sales or other events can cause usage to increase considerably, and drop off to normal levels later on. Tarzey noted that maintaining extra resources just for these times can become extremely costly for an organization.

“Far cheaper is to have an arrangement with a cloud service provider that allows new application workloads to be provisioned at will,” Tarzey wrote. “The same resource can be rented from a public cloud provider on the rare occasion it is needed. Having a cloud provider on standby is a far more cost-effective way of having redundant infrastructure.”

This way, the service provider can keep this additional capacity ready and is able to intelligently disperse it as needed.