What Is Hybrid Cloud? Definition, Architecture, and Management Best Practices for 2021

Hybrid cloud is defined as a computing model that integrates a public cloud, private cloud, or on-premise infrastructure to run an organization’s workload and applications. This article introduces you to hybrid cloud, its components, and the best hybrid cloud management practices in 2021. 

Table of Contents

• What Is Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure?
• Key Architectural Components of Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
• Top 8 Best Practices for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Management in 2021

What Is Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure?

Hybrid cloud is a computing model that integrates public cloud, private cloud, or on-premise infrastructure to run an organization’s workload and applications.

Cloud computing has been on the rise ever since organizations clued in on its cost and maintenance advantages. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings such as Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure have become increasingly important while making architectural decisions. The COVID-19 pandemic has expanded the need for on-demand, scalable cloud models that ensure business continuity. In fact, Gartner forecasts that organizations will spend 18% more on public cloud services in 2021 than the previous year. 

Traditional Hybrid Cloud Architecture

Public clouds are traditionally hardware, network, storage, and computing resources owned and maintained by third-party vendors. Though using a public cloud does offset the cost of setting up on-premise infrastructure from scratch, it comes with its own pitfalls. Organizations often face a lack of data visibility when it comes to public clouds. Public cloud vendors and their users work on a ‘shared responsibility’ model, which means that organizations are responsible for most of the security aspects. Add in compliance regulations, and it becomes crucial that organizations have a strong hold on how and where their systems are running.

This is why more and more organizations are opting for private cloud models. Private cloud may be an entire data center that is deployed, operated, and maintained on-premise. This requires a lot of capital. Another option is using rented, vendor-owned data centers that are off-premise. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure each provide their own private cloud solutions. Vendor-driven public clouds are shared with other users (though one customer’s data is hidden from another), while a vendor-owned private cloud is specific to an organization and involves no sharing. Though they do provide more control, private clouds are more expensive than public clouds. 

All applications and data owned by an organization do not have the same requirements in terms of space, computation, security, and compliance. While some operations such as email and file sharing can be hosted on a public cloud, proprietary operations and sensitive customer data would be more secure in an on-premise or private cloud setup. This is where the hybrid cloud comes in.

A hybrid cloud aims to make a single, flexible infrastructure that connects various workloads running in different computational environments. If done right, IT admins and DevOps teams will be able to access and maintain their systems and data through one hybrid cloud management console. In other words, separate clouds become hybrid when there’s a level of orchestration between them.

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Why enterprises should consider hybrid clouds

Hybrid clouds offer the best of both worlds—the flexibility and cost-efficiency of a public cloud coupled with the security of dedicated hardware. Agility is the main appeal of a hybrid cloud system. The ability to scale up or pare down computational overheads is a huge advantage for companies that house various services and applications across a diverse set of clients. 

Hybrid clouds are built with the optimal configuration of private and public clouds to handle demand peaks. ‘Cloud bursting’ is the ability of the hybrid cloud manager to expand and borrow from public cloud resources when private clouds have reached their capacity. This makes perfect sense when businesses are aware in advance that their systems will be overwhelmed, such as retail outlets on Black Friday.

Hybrid clouds are also a good option for companies that do not want to be tied down to a single vendor. A diversified infrastructure tends to be more efficient, secure, and cost-effective than relying on a single monolith.

Companies that serve clients in varied industries need to implement different security and regulatory policies. A hybrid cloud enables seamless operations in such a scenario. For example, healthcare clients must comply with HIPAA regulations, and hence, data privacy is of utmost importance. This makes them ideal candidates for the private cloud.

Hybrid clouds also accelerate new development by allowing the deployment of nascent applications with untested loads. This allows the development team to forecast the resources required to run their operations with minimum initial investment (thanks to public cloud’s pay-per-use model). 

As you can see, hybrid clouds leverage the advantages of both public and private clouds. This plays a big role in business continuity, which means that disaster recovery is much easier with hybrid infrastructure in place. The hybrid cloud architecture provides advantages at all levels: development, IT, DevOps, and business. IDC’s 2021 report states that, by 2022, 87% of enterprises will rely on a hybrid cloud strategy for their operations.

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Key Architectural Components of Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

The unifying nature of the hybrid cloud infrastructure implies that it is more complex than just setting up a public or private cloud. Data migration across multiple layers becomes a crucial part of the overall system. Access and control need to be centralized as well, with unified authentication and authorization processes in place. Besides, security controls need to measure up to the larger attack surface that a hybrid cloud brings forth.

Keeping all this in mind, a typical hybrid cloud infrastructure consists of the following components.

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Components

1. Public cloud

Public cloud is usually an IaaS platform that owns and manages computing and storage devices for clients. Most organizations use at least everyday applications such as email on a third-party cloud, even if they do not use complete computational environments such as AWS. Every hybrid cloud architecture has at least one public cloud component.

2. Private cloud or on-premise servers, or both

Private clouds are dedicated systems that serve only the organization in question, and often come at a higher price than public clouds. They may be set up internally or consumed as a service from a third-party vendor. The only difference from on-premise infrastructure is that they can be hosted off-premise and accessed via the cloud. Hybrid cloud architecture has at least one private cloud or on-premise setup.

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3. Integrators

The whole concept of a hybrid cloud hinges on how well existing components are connected and set up for upcoming additions. There needs to be active communication between each element. This is typically implemented by using application programming interfaces (APIs), virtual private networks (VPNs), and wide area networks (WANs). A hybrid cloud is only as efficient as its integration mechanism. Each of these methods needs to be secure to prevent data loss, compromise, or theft.

4. Data fabric

Data fabric is a software-led approach that provides a unified architecture that runs on top of the diverse technologies involved in a hybrid environment. It allows organizations to manage the data that flows between each segment. Data fabric is akin to a weave spread over every access and storage point in the architecture. 

These points may be anywhere—public cloud, private cloud, or traditional on-premise systems. The fabric facilitates the processing, movement, storage, and maintenance of data at any point inside it. This means that there’s more than one pathway to gain access at any given time. If one connection is overloaded, the system will find other pathways to complete the given action.

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5. Unified management tools

Security is important for any technology infrastructure. The standard set of tools required to protect critical assets becomes all the more important in a hybrid cloud. This is because the hybrid cloud manager acts as a central access point to all the environments that the technology runs on. This includes bridging different login systems, various features, and different data manipulations. These tools include:

a. Centralized IAM across environments: Identity access management is the starting point of every secure system. A central system with unified access policies makes it easier to maintain users and audit user activity. This helps identify bad users, anomalies in user behavior, and regulatory compliance. Since these access points are the windows to the entire system, a good IAM with well-thought-out access policies is a must. 

b. Integrated network with segmentation: WAN is a network of networks. It relays traffic between multiple independent networks and works based on virtualization, application-level policies, and overlay networks. In this case, a single network with appropriate segmentation to safeguard critical resources helps keep open lines of communication between various components.

c. Resource management: Management software is necessary to allocate resources based on application requirements. This, coupled with a good authentication strategy, must allow DevOps to provision resources on-demand. 

d. Monitoring solutions: Once a hybrid system is created, it only makes sense for admins and security teams to have a bird’s eye view of the system in place. This allows them to spot redundancies and under-utilized servers. It also helps avoid unnecessary costs. A central logging and reporting solution also enables security teams to be proactive and allows smoother compliance audits. 

e. Data governance tools: Data governance tools enable the creation and maintenance of policies and protocols that outline how an organization’s data must be stored, managed, and used. Considering that a good hybrid network requires a robust data fabric and needs consensus on the movement of data between multiple environments, a data governance tool would be an invaluable asset for an organization.

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The components that we talked about above are the most common ways of building a hybrid cloud infrastructure. This involves using multiple iterations of middleware to connect various clouds in the system. Cloud vendors such as AWS provide preconfigured VPNs to allow easy integration with other clouds. This way of creating a hybrid network makes the most sense when organizations already have legacy systems in place and are opting for the cloud for newer applications.

Another way of building a hybrid cloud is to develop and deploy small, portable, loosely coupled apps that can run in any environment. This means that instead of focusing on connecting various environments, underlying hardware and operating systems are made uniform. This eliminates the need for complex APIs to connect with each other. 

The fluidity of the apps themselves makes it easier for them to move across the components. This method of building a hybrid cloud relies largely on microservices. It also allows for seamless integration between the development and DevOps teams. This is a more modern approach to the hybrid cloud concept and is the best way to build infrastructure from scratch.

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Multi-cloud vs. hybrid cloud

A multi-cloud architecture is a deployment model that runs on multiple public cloud services. While it sounds very similar to the hybrid cloud model, it differs because there is always a private cloud or on-premise component involved in the latter. An example of a multi-cloud environment is an organization that uses one public cloud service for storage and another for specific app-level computations. 

Most organizations are turning to multi-cloud environments when they find that one service provider does not meet all their needs. This also offers the same advantage as a hybrid cloud: diversification of infrastructure, resulting in reduced risk. Most public cloud services come with integration tools that enable interaction with other public clouds.

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Top 8 Best Practices for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Management in 2021

As enterprises increasingly look toward hybrid cloud models, here are some best practices for efficient enterprise hybrid cloud management.

Best Practices for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Management

1. Identify and optimize the workload

The first step toward creating a hybrid cloud infrastructure is to understand and analyze the data and applications running on each individual cloud environment. Stakeholders need to gather information such as:

• Who uses each segment of data?
• How do users and applications interact with this data?
• How does information flow across each environment?
• Which of these resources are critical for business continuity?

This focus on data storage and movement is essential since cloud performance is largely governed by data movement across the network. The unnecessary data flow can negatively affect performance, which is the last thing organizations want from their cloud setups.

2. Perform cost analysis

Workload and cost analytics go hand in hand when scrutinizing existing infrastructure for hybrid changes. Each cloud provider offers its own pricing model. Organizations may need to consolidate this information and analyze it with respect to how costs pan out for existing (and future) workloads. 

Rehauling of most hybrid clouds is done to reduce costs and improve performance, and, as such, both short-term and long-term costs need to be considered. Furthermore, every capital expense for a new hardware or software requirement must be analyzed for costs against using the public cloud. 

It is also important for organizations to be aware of their cloud provider’s SLAs and costs. Most public cloud vendors do not charge for data flowing into the system but do charge for data flowing out of it. These costs may add up to make hybrid clouds more expensive than private ones. 

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3. Deploy consolidated hybrid cloud management

All public clouds come with their own management consoles and tools. These work well if the company’s architecture solely banks on one vendor’s private and public cloud offerings. But that is usually not the case, especially in today’s services technology culture. When multiple clouds are being used, admins learn all the individual native interfaces to handle each one.

This calls for one hybrid cloud management tool that manages and monitors resources across all components. Third-party hybrid cloud management tools are often compatible with more than one cloud vendor. Organizations can build and deploy their own hybrid cloud tool around these third-party offerings. This is called a ‘single pane of glass’ approach. Having a centralized interface for all cloud modules saves the company valuable time.

4. Automating where ever possible

IT processes such as deployment, monitoring, and resource provisioning can be automated. This saves time and reduces human error. It allows DevOps teams to focus on crucial development and improvement processes. Some tools available to automate hybrid cloud systems include API integration, network management, performance tracking, resource management, and DevOps management. This is where tools such as Kubernetes come into the picture. While coming up with a hybrid cloud strategy, it is important to determine which of these automation tools will enable seamless daily operations.

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5. Enforce uniform governance policies

Hybrid cloud managers need to come up with written policies for cloud governance. This needs to be done with several stakeholders from within the organization, including someone from the DevOps team and the business team. Data governance is important in a hybrid scenario where each environment is designed in a unique way. Governance policies ensure that no zombie servers exist on any cloud and are draining money that can be used for other operational activities. They also ensure that no data is lost or compromised in translation. 

6. Formulate a hybrid cloud security strategy

Hybrid clouds span across multiple locations and environments. This means that security is not as straightforward as an on-premise or public cloud setup. A sound security strategy must be part of the overall hybrid cloud strategy. 

There are three types of security controls to be considered: physical, technical, and administrative. Typically, physical security controls are part of the SLAs with cloud providers. Technical controls include identity and access management solutions, firewalls, and content filtering systems. Since data is constantly transitioning between environments, data encryption must be enabled for both data at rest and data in motion. This requires some strategic thought since too much encryption can prove costly in terms of performance and usability.

Administrative security controls encompass disaster recovery planning and other activities that ensure business continuity. 

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7. Select the right cloud vendor

When an organization decides to transition to a hybrid cloud architecture, the first thing to do is to take stock of existing workloads. Next comes finding cloud vendors who are equipped to handle the organization’s workloads effectively. Some key aspects to look for while shortlisting cloud vendors include integration tools, ease of data migration, scalability options, and resource management.

Since creating a hybrid cloud infrastructure is complex, it helps to approach cloud vendors who’ve already worked with organizations in the same industry and have a good track record. If an organization lacks the expertise to make this leap, consultants can be hired.

8. Implement hybrid cloud in stages

It is tempting to think that the hybrid cloud will automatically be built by putting all public and private cloud components in place. In reality, it makes more sense to start small. First, build a private cloud, either in-house or by choosing the right vendor based on organizational needs. The next step would be to transition only a few select applications and modules and see what changes need to be made for the overall transition. 

This method of troubleshooting issues at the beginning will provide flexibility at the end. Once a hybrid strategy has been written, and the implementation is successful, the architecture must be revisited at scheduled intervals to see what changes can be made to meet the company’s future needs.

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In conclusion

Hybrid clouds are fast being relied upon by enterprises for flexible, scalable, and secure environments. Hybrid cloud, as an infrastructure, must be open to changes based on evolving requirements. This means that organizations with hybrid cloud capabilities can adapt faster to business and technological changes. This is an edge that enterprises cannot afford to miss out on in present times.

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