Hybrid cloud solutions are a mix of one or more parts of public clouds, private clouds and local infrastructure. The local infrastructure can be colocation, dedicated servers or – with the right web service – even infrastructure in your local office.
The concept of several deployment models in a hybrid cloud creates a seamless, secure and automated environment for maximum productivity and flexibility. Each hybrid cloud model is different and should be developed to best suit an organisation's unique needs. Organisations with higher security requirements can retain much of their local infrastructure and use a cloud solution for less critical resources, while companies with dynamic needs and high availability requirements can choose a private cloud with the option to move to the public cloud during peak periods.

Why hybrid cloud solutions?

In a hybrid solution, organisations can integrate confidential data from the private environment with applications running in the cloud. The organisation decides which applications, data and resources can be placed in the public cloud, which must be stored in a private environment and how this information should be sent and received between them.

For organisations with local infrastructure, hybrid cloud offers excellent opportunities to optimise operations. One of the biggest advantages of hybrid cloud is that organisations can benefit from the performance and flexibility of cloud solutions without having to get rid of existing technology or buy new infrastructure.

The separate cases have different contact points and integrations with each other, but the infrastructures are completely independent of each other (except at the logical level, where it is controlled by how you choose the solutions to communicate with each other), which prevents data from leaking from one platform to another.

5 reasons to use hybrid cloud solutions

  1. Use the cloud as your lifeline for disaster recovery

    Disaster recovery (DR) is one of the biggest advantages that hybrid cloud offers companies and organisations. If your company requires DR to be available, there are two options:

    - Duplicate your existing physical infrastructure in two locations so that if a disaster occurs, it can be restarted in another data centre. This is a very costly solution because you have to invest in twice as much infrastructure as you actually need.

    - Use a cloud solution as your DR. Since cloud solutions are based on the principle of only paying for what you use, this is a much more cost-effective solution than duplicating your own hardware. The only ongoing cost is storage, because data always needs to be available on the mirror side in case something happens to the primary location, as well as some network costs, as this also needs to be prepared. However, the heavy cost item for computing (CPU/RAM) only occurs when it is actually used.

    Learn more about disaster recovery

  2. Become more agile and lower the threshold for innovation

    More and more demand the ability to work more agilely. Being able to quickly meet customer and business requirements is a constant challenge for companies and a major driver for DevOps and other agile development methods. The use of cloud solutions is crucial for DevOps and is becoming increasingly important for all companies. As more organisations become agile, competition has increased, driving companies to innovate faster and faster.

    Hybrid cloud enables companies to keep up with changing customer needs by making innovation more agile and accessible, while avoiding disrupting the entire organisation by moving to a full-scale cloud environment. With the right hybrid cloud provider, migration to and from environments, whether virtual machines or containers, can be as simple as pressing a button, allowing your team to work and collaborate quickly and efficiently regardless of where they are.

  3. Use the cloud for peak loads

    Companies and organisations often handle loads that vary in usage. Building your own infrastructure to handle peak loads is costly and inefficient. The cloud offers the great advantage of unlimited resources that you can use when you need them, and hybrid cloud offers the added advantage of careful monitoring of all used resources for the best balance between the organisation's demand and supply.

    One way for companies to benefit from hybrid cloud is through a feature often called 'cloud bursting'. Cloud bursting means that the workload is automatically extended to a public cloud during peaks and then scaled back to the original servers when the peak is over. The additional storage and computing resources are basically only rented for the time they are needed. Cloud bursting eliminates, especially for high-performance applications, many of the problems, both in terms of cost and performance, that resource peaks can create.

  4. Separate sensitive and non-sensitive information

    Many companies have been hesitant to move to the cloud due to concerns about security, privacy and regulations. This is of course a very important aspect, but it is also a problem that hybrid cloud can help solve. While privacy and security are among the most important things to consider, companies still need to develop at a fast pace, something that fully private infrastructure often cannot sustain.

    Companies that are not fast enough will be overtaken by more innovative competitors. Another advantage of hybrid cloud solutions for companies handling confidential data is the possibility to create a 'multi-tenant' within the hybrid solution, which separates applications and resources from each other and can be further isolated with VLAN and additional encryption methods.

  5. Use cloud solutions to scale up as you grow

    By integrating with your existing infrastructure, a hybrid cloud solution offers an easy way to cost-effectively extend your cloud capabilities. Whether your organisation is already growing or planning for growth, the scalability of local infrastructure can provide significant savings.

    A hybrid cloud solution is an excellent way to continue to meet current business needs while supporting both current and future growth. Binero's private and public cloud platforms make it easy for you to scale up your IT as your business grows – without having to make major investments, which in the worst case could cause you to miss out on potential growth.