If you missed Part I of our ‘Getting your head in the cloud’ series where we looked at public vs private cloud, you can find it here.

Now that you’ve caught up, welcome to Part II ?

So let’s begin at the beginning by answering a simple question.

How did hybrid come into being?

Full disclaimer, this next part is borrowed from ‘The ironic history of the hybrid cloud’ – highly recommend reading that if you’re curious as to how both the cloud and Hybrid cloud came into being.

Long story short, hybrid cloud came into being because humans are, well, we don’t want to say lazy, so let’s go with naturally conservative when it comes to spending energy unnecessarily…

Basically, when Amazon Web Services launched its Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006, it allowed people and businesses to rent computing resources to run applications. This is widely considered as the birth of the public cloud.

Once people cottoned on to the fact that they could rent computing resources through AWS, they started short-cutting IT to using unapproved cloud services to handle their heavy lifting.

This saved them loads of time and money, but exposed their businesses to the kinds of security risks that make CSOs start twitching involuntarily.

And so the hybrid cloud was born to effectively create a bridge between the cloud and traditional IT resources. In a true hybrid cloud, private and public clouds are often deployed together and data can move between the two through the use of an API, over a WPN or through WAN.

These points of connection are the key definer of a hybrid cloud. Even if you have private and public cloud setups, if data cannot flow seamlessly between the two, it ain’t a hybrid setup.

Advantages of a hybrid cloud set up

• Ring-fence – You can ensure that sensitive, private client data is kept out of the public cloud.
• Elastic – You can keep vital applications running in the private cloud and add capacity from the public cloud.
• Deployment – You can build privately (and securely) and then deploy to a public space for testing.

Building the optimal hybrid cloud for your business

Your particular hybrid cloud architecture will depend on your businesses particular needs.

Ask yourself the following question: what will each deployment will be used for. You may want to use a public cloud to run business critical applications while using a private cloud for data storage.

It can help to break out your requirements into different categories such as:

• Security requirements
• Regulatory compliance
• Performance requirements and
• Application support.

Data regulations have become far more stringent in recent years with legislation like GDPR coming into place. It has become essential to know exactly where client data sits.

It’s damn near impossible to know where data is located in a public cloud setup. This is where using a private cloud component is ideal.

In broad terms, public clouds are good for:

• CRMs
• Email tools
• Office software apps
• Apps for collaboration
• HR apps

And private clouds are good for:

• Business intelligence apps
• Sensitive and private data
• Supply chain management
• Supporting R&D
• Enterprise resource planning.

Getting the most out of your hybrid cloud

In Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud Report, many organisations highlighted how difficult it was to accurately estimate cloud spend. Most were going over budget as they were unable to determine what their exact needs would be.

In addition to this, complex and multi-layered cloud environments make it difficult to correctly chart application dependencies. If cloud progress is measured through cost, efficiency, savings and speed then this is a major red flag.

Despite the fact that nearly every business on the planet uses hybrid cloud services, most organisations struggle to use them effectively. That’s where we come in.

We have the expertise to assess your needs and plans to ensure that you have the correct cloud set up and your budget is used effectively.

We can even help you set up a cost-effective private cloud environment using top quality refurbished hardware.

So yeah, there’s a joke in there about us being pretty confident you’ll be on Cloud 9 if you choose to work with us, but we won’t go there ?

Give us a shout at contact@relltek.com or Contact Relltek on +44 (0)203 0922 787 and let’s have that chat.