How Hybrid Cloud Delivers the Best Business Benefits

The Hybrid Cloud combines the benefits of private and public cloud. However, their management requires more effort and specific tools. Many companies help the organizations to launch and operate hybrid clouds, optimize network components, and use other technologies. Crises are catalysts for technological developments. This year, digitalization has received a huge boost in one fell swoop. The world is turning into the digital, and that’s what the industry is needed for. Demand for digital services and technologies was initially driven by the need for home office solutions, office and collaboration tools – and thus delivered many arguments per cloud. However, even before the pandemic crisis, the cloud paradigm was irreplaceable for modernizing IT. Without cloud computing, the agility, flexibility, and scalability needed to transform businesses digitally cannot be achieved. According to different studies, around 70 percent of the companies now use cloud services.

Deployment Models: Public vs. Private Cloud

However, cloud computing has become increasingly differentiated in recent years. If the public cloud initially revealed the possibilities of the new technology, the concept of the private cloud continues to gain ground, but without fundamentally questioning the public cloud.

Private and public clouds have their specific advantages and disadvantages. The key benefit of public clouds is that organizations can access standardized IT resources very quickly, flexibly, and inexpensively, for example, to test or make new applications and business models available. This is often much faster, more flexible and cheaper than through internal IT. However, public clouds are increasingly failing due to increased compliance requirements, especially when important data is held in data centers abroad. Private clouds are more secure in this respect, because the data is kept here internally.

The best of two worlds – Hybrid Clouds

Nevertheless, the hybrid cloud will become the standard in the next few years, as it combines the advantages of both worlds: In a hybrid cloud, a private cloud is operated with resources from the company’s own IT together with public cloud services. This mix allows companies to make their IT very flexible – without neglecting the security aspect or compromising compliance. Hybrid clouds can be used to run specific enterprise workloads in the most efficient cloud environment: Business software with critical data such as ERP or CRM is operated in the private cloud, while other, less critical IT services such as e-mail or office applications can be obtained via public cloud. By building a hybrid cloud environment, the different applications are linked together and data is automatically exchanged, business processes can be designed faster.

Hybrid clouds also make it possible to use the internal IT or private cloud in normal operation and to add additional IT services from an external public cloud provider at any time when needed or at peak loads. In this way, companies can very flexibly cushion peak loads, as IT resources can be quickly adapted to current needs. Additional computing power can be used at short notice, for example in highly seasonal business. This makes IT more agile. The typical example is the online store, which buys server and storage capacity into the Christmas business, which would otherwise be idle throughout the year if they were available in their own data center.

Requirements for a Hybrid Cloud

But even the Hybrid Cloud is not an egg-laying woolly milk sow. Operation and management of a hybrid IT landscape are much more complex than with a pure private cloud. Specific tools are needed to ensure functionalities such as data exchange, security, provisioning, etc. In addition, the use of hybrid clouds in the implementation phase leads to an increased administrative burden compared to private clouds and public clouds. In addition, for services to move seamlessly between the on-premises private and public public cloud, integration must take place at various levels, including the network, security, application, and management levels. Within a hybrid cloud environment, individual infrastructure components must be combined to manage, automate, and orchestrate your resources.

Intel helps cloud users and operators introduce and operate hybrid clouds with processors, network components, work and data storage technologies. In addition, Intel works with major public cloud service providers – including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure – to optimize the performance of Intel technologies in their data centers.

To launch a hybrid cloud, users need a powerful platform and a robust partner ecosystem to support. Intel Select Solutions for Hybrid Cloud bring cloud services to your local data center with simple, improved deployment. These verified solutions provide a coordinated and optimized infrastructure for private cloud strategies with software-defined computing, data storage, and network capabilities. Developers can also choose from a wide range of resources at Intel, including virtualization, orchestration, and container software.

The Final Words

There are many examples of companies that benefit from Intel cloud technologies. Small and medium-sized enterprises sometimes hesitate on cloud computing. They are often deterred by the high price of some private cloud offerings, the risk of using a shared infrastructure, and the need to get involved in specific tools. For this reason, the cloud provider should be optimized for the midsize companies.