26 Hybrid cloud, in a nutshell, is about IT freedom. It’s the combination of public, private cloud and on-premises deployment models to fit the unique needs of an organization. Hybrid cloud ensures a single, unified and flexible distributed data architecture that provides orchestration, management and application. And it’s rapidly growing in popularity. The 2022 Hybrid Cloud Trends report from Cisco and 451 Research found that 82% of IT leaders say they’ve adopted this approach. That’s not surprising considering all of the benefits it offers. The myriad benefits of hybrid cloud Hybrid cloud data is about the use of this hybrid environment for use cases that optimize the protection, security, availability and cost of enterprise data. What if your organization could scale computing resources while also reducing the costs of managing spikes in demand? What if you had the flexibility to free up local resources as needed? This is just part of the promise of hybrid cloud, which offers: Unlimited scalability: It’s easy to deploy and scale data to meet demand spikes. It allows you to meet data management requirements in real time, with the ability to upscale resources on a temporary or more permanent basis. Lower total cost of ownership (TCO): With a hybrid-cloud data architecture, you only pay for what you need — and you can choose whichever environment is most cost-effective. Flexibility: Migrate application workloads to and from their on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud whenever necessary. Reliability: Distributed data across multiple data centers means your content is secure without fear of data loss. Regulatory compliance: Public organizations in regulated industries must follow restrictions on where data can reside. Hybrid cloud allows for this flexibility to meet regulatory requirements. Speed: Faster delivery means data is where it needs to be — on time and according to demand. Adaptability: Technology does not sleep, and nor should your data. Integration of new applications can be made easy with hybrid cloud, so nobody is left behind.Improved security: When it comes to ransomware risk, no one is immune and everyone is a target. It’s not a matter of “if” but when a ransomware attack will hit your organization. When you restore from an immutable backup repository, recovery is swift and simple. It’s your insurance policy against ransomware and data loss. How do hybrid clouds work? A hybrid cloud creates a unified environment in which to manage on-premises, private and public cloud resources. The fundamental difference between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud is that the latter consists solely of two or more public cloud providers. While the public cloud is a good option for some applications and for short-term data storage, it doesn’t fulfill every need. It doesn’t provide users with enough control over the infrastructure, the performance is lacking, and security can be an issue. That’s why more and more organizations are looking to a hybrid approach. A hybrid-cloud approach automates the deployment of workloads to the best cloud environment for a given purpose, at a given time. Hybrid cloud also helps companies modernize applications faster — and connect cloud services to data on cloud or on-premises infrastructure in ways that deliver greater value. Another perk? Creating a unified hybrid platform enables an organization to draw upon best-of-breed cloud security and regulatory compliance technologies and implement security and compliance across all environments in a consistent way. Hybrid cloud in practice Using hybrid cloud allows you to free IT staff from the time-consuming work of archiving, managing and deploying content so they can focus on what matters most. This requires implementation of suitable hardware within the data center, including servers, storage, a local area network and load balancers. Hybrid cloud in practice Scality RING and ARTESCA solutions fill that essential technological requirement. In fact, Scality ranked #1 in both Hybrid Cloud and Cloud-Native Storage in the 2021 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage. Scality’s customers span industries, use cases and continents — and many of them are now using a hybrid-cloud approach. They rely on Scality for their mission-critical applications, ensuring petabytes of data remain secure while always available.Want to learn more about hybrid cloud? Check out this blog on hybrid-cloud data management, watch Scality’s presentation at the 2021 Cloud Field Day, and learn more about how Bloomberg Media Group is solving cloud media workflows across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
