What Is a Hybrid Cloud?

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Companies currently running private clouds within their enterprise and datacenters are comfortable with the foundational concepts of cloud computing, including instant access to computing resources, shared machines, and the pay-for use concept.

However, moving their services outside the company firewall to a publicly shared service hosted by a third-party provider is currently not a well-accepted concept for many large enterprises or companies concerned about security and privacy. Thus, a pure public cloud option is not yet viable for a large segment of cloud customers.

To solve this concern, the cloud computing industry has responded with a new cloud concept: hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud creates a bridge for a private cloud to a public cloud where the management interface allows workload movement between private and hybrid clouds within a single, secure system.

The image below shows how the hybrid cloud overlaps between the private and public cloud, giving the enterprise customer the features they need to move workloads out of their internal firewall.

With this cloud advancement, enterprise customers can begin moving less critical workloads into the public cloud space without jeopardizing their existing infrastructure or security, as the same tools and utilities manage both the private and hybrid clouds.

Here are some recent articles on the growth of hybrid cloud computing:

• Red River, "'2012 is a tipping point year for hybrid cloud adoption as businesses move production workloads to the cloud,' said Adam Wray, president and CEO of a data center provider. 'Virtual private cloud offerings... are uniquely positioned to serve this growing demand.'"
• Analysys Mason, "At the Data Centre World 2012 conference, it seemed that the debate is slowly moving away from public or private cloud, to the possibility of having a public and private cloud, known as hybrid cloud, where internal enterprise data centres and cloud continue to support mission-critical business processes, and public cloud is used to enable on-demand hosting capacity for less critical assets."
• McAfee, "The source cited Deloitte Consulting's recent technology trends report, a study that revealed enterprises are moving toward cloud solutions composed of public and private clouds. The research found that many companies are migrating critical business applications and infrastructure services to the hybrid cloud."