What the hell is a hybrid cloud?
August 9, 2011
Firstly, there was just the Cloud; now we have to deal with the hybrid Cloud. So what on earth is it?…
There are variable definitions of hybrid cloud available, however, the major two seem to be:
1. A hybrid cloud is a composition of at least one private cloud and at least one public Cloud.
A hybrid cloud is typically offered in one of two ways: a vendor has a private cloud and forms a partnership with a public Cloud provider, or a public Cloud provider forms a partnership with a vendor that provides private Cloud platforms.
2. A hybrid Cloud is a Cloud computing environment in which an organization provides and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally.
For example, an organisation might use a public Cloud service, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for archived data but continue to maintain in-house storage for operational customer data.
Ideally, the hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public Cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities. This type of hybrid Cloud is also referred to as hybrid IT.