If you’re reading this article, then you might be tasked with finding out how hybrid cloud fits in with your company’s current architecture. Or perhaps you’re just curious about how this cloud computing approach works.

Either way, here you’ll find lots of useful information about what hybrid cloud is, the advantages are of using it, and what options are available for your business.

Contents section

• What is hybrid cloud?
• How do hybrid clouds work?
  • Private cloud
  • Public cloud
  • Hybrid cloud
• Advantages of hybrid cloud
• Limitations
• Who is hybrid cloud suitable for?
• Hybrid cloud implementation
• Our hybrid cloud solutions

What is hybrid cloud?

The term ‘hybrid’ is used in everyday vernacular and refers to things that have been combined to make something new. In the case of the cloud, ‘hybrid’ means a mix of different ‘types’ or environments.

In essence, it’s an architecture that connects a company’s on-premises private cloud services to a third-party public cloud. Thereby creating a single infrastructure from which an organisation can choose the optimal cloud for each application or workload.

For example, it could include on-premise private clouds, externally hosted private clouds and public cloud services. It may also be a mix of UK-based hosting services with global hyperscale public cloud services.

Many organisations choose a hybrid cloud architecture to deploy their applications and data across a range of cloud environments. There might be instances where an application can’t be put into a public cloud for commercial or data protection reasons, so it is deployed internally or in a private cloud environment.

How do hybrid clouds work?

There are three main forms of cloud computing: private, public and hybrid. To understand how hybrid cloud solutions work, we first need to look at the differences between public and private clouds.

Public cloud

The public cloud is defined as computing services offered by third-party providers over the public Internet.

In a public cloud model, a company is essentially renting a portion of its distributed data centre infrastructure. The third-party cloud provider delivers compute, network, storage, and application resources while maintaining management rights. Some of the largest service providers include AWS, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, IBM, and Oracle.

Public clouds deliver cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). One of the main benefits for businesses is that the provider bears all the operational costs associated with hosting an application or workload. This offers you significant cost savings and takes the burden away from your IT staff.

Private cloud

As you might have guessed, the private cloud involves deploying infrastructure on your premises, as opposed to someone else’s. This is also called an internal or corporate cloud.

The corporate cloud can be offered either over the internet or via a private internal network. In the case of the former, many organisations build private clouds on rented data centres located off-premises to keep costs down.

Housing a private cloud yourself requires you to pay for the upfront expense of maintaining the equipment. You will also need the appropriate in-house IT experts to manage the infrastructure.

One of the main benefits of having a private cloud is that it gives you complete control over the computing environment and data. This may be pertinent to a company dealing with sensitive data or having to abide by strict regulations.

How does hybrid cloud differ to public or private?

Hybrid cloud allows companies to scale computing resources by allowing data and applications to be shared between both public and private clouds.

One reason you might want to do this is to gain the flexibility of the public cloud for basic computer tasks, while keeping sensitive data or intellectual property behind a company firewall via a private network. It also allows businesses to free up resources and make cost savings by delivering less mission-critical applications via the public cloud.

If you’ve already invested a significant amount of money into on-premise hardware, you can still use software as a service (SaaS) public cloud products for functions like customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning.

Hybrid cloud allows users to get the best out of both worlds, depending on the needs of the business, regulations and the data that’s being hosted. It can be used in many ways. It’s a good staging area, a good platform for building confidence in the cloud, developing a transformation programme on and carrying it out.

In the same vein, it may be a deployment model that must be used, either for compliance, regulatory, risk, latency or data sovereignty issues. Regardless, the benefits will depend on your business objectives.

The pros and cons of hybrid cloud

One of the main advantages of hybrid solutions is known as cloud bursting. This means if an organisation reaches maximum resource capacity, the overflow traffic is directed to a public cloud. This seamless transition from the private cloud is particularly useful for businesses that experience variable demand, such as those in the retail sector.

Here are some more advantages of hybrid cloud:

• Flexible policy-driven deployment to distribute workloads across public and private environments based on security, performance and cost requirements.
• Scalability of public cloud is achieved without exposing sensitive IT workloads to the inherent security risks.
• High reliability as the services are distributed across multiple data centres both public and private.
• Improved security as sensitive IT workloads run on dedicated resources in private clouds while regular workloads are spread across inexpensive public cloud to trade-off for cost investments.

Limitations of hybrid cloud architecture:

• It can get expensive.
• Strong compatibility and integration are required between cloud infrastructure spanning different locations and categories. This is a limitation with public cloud deployments, for which organisations lack direct control over the infrastructure.
• Additional infrastructure complexity is introduced as organisations operate and manage an evolving mix of private and public clouds.

Who is hybrid cloud suitable for?

There are multiple reasons why an organisation may choose to operate a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

It might be that your business has run out of physical space in your data centre. Or you are hosting a consumer website with the application databases placed on a private network. The opportunities for hybrid cloud solutions are gigantic and will depend on your business objectives.

Here are a few examples of situations where it can be useful:

• Organisations serving multiple verticals facing different IT security, regulatory and performance requirements.
• Optimising cloud investments without compromising on the value proposition of either public or private cloud technologies.
• Improving security in an existing cloud environment, such as SaaS offerings that must be delivered via secure private networks.
• Organisations that are still on their ‘cloud journey’. A hybrid cloud environment enables you to leverage the flexibility, scalability and the potential cost savings of the cloud without having to commit to moving all workloads to the cloud in one go.

Hybrid cloud implementation

How your cloud infrastructure is implemented will partly depend on the size of your organisation and business objectives. But there are a few considerations you should keep in mind, including:

• Defining the right application and data deployment model.
• Working in tandem with your enterprise systems.
• Assessing connectivity requirements.
• Assessing existing compliance frameworks and highlight gaps.
• Implementing security and privacy measures.
• Managing the cloud environment.
• Creating a backup and data recovery plan.

Our hybrid cloud solutions

As a hosting provider, we can offer you hybrid cloud solutions. We will bring all your different cloud environments together and manage them centrally. This gives you the ability to move data and apps between environments easily.

We will ensure everything ‘speaks to each other’ and that workloads can be moved from one cloud to another.

There are multiple ways of beginning your transition; the first (and perhaps most important) is understanding your organisation’s current state and defining your cloud aspirations. This can be done in several ways, including conducting a cloud readiness assessment, which determines your organisation’s current state and what’s needed to start your journey.

At Pulsant, we assess and baseline our customers against what we call a Cloud Maturity Matrix. The matrix acts as a guide to determine which cloud services are best suited to your business, by looking at how far along the migration journey you are. This includes looking at the various cloud services you’re already using, where you aspire to be, and then helps you plot a path forward, essentially helping you manage the process.

To find out more about our hybrid cloud services, contact our team today and we’ll be happy to find a solution that fits your business.

The post What is Hybrid Cloud? appeared first on Pulsant.

More and more businesses are migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for their technology resources. As a cost-effective, high-performance, scalable and secure cloud platform, AWS offers numerous services for database management and cloud storage. It also supports newer technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning.

Unfortunately, there is an important question that too often goes unasked, let alone answered, when organisations are considering adopting AWS – are you fully prepared and ready?

There is a great deal of work to be done to put everything in place before making the move to cloud. The good news is that you can avoid the potential pitfalls simply by going through the proper process. The key here is taking a business approach, rather than an IT approach.

Further questions that you need to be able to answer include; do you have the required policies and procedures to operate in the cloud? Do you have the skill sets, the business processes, and know-how to lock the environment down? You must be confident that you have all the checks and balances in place.

But where do you actually start? One of the best places is by using a framework to guide you.

Use the Cloud Adoption Framework

There are a host of companies who can guide you through the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) as the first step on your journey into the cloud. The CAF was created to help organisations design and travel an accelerated path to successful cloud adoption. Similar to an audit, you’ll answer a list of questions, such as do you have processes for ordering new servers on-premise and is there a process for ordering new software?

The guidance and best practices provided by the framework will help you build a comprehensive approach to cloud computing across your organisation, and throughout your IT lifecycle. By using the CAF and having these processes in place you should be able to quickly achieve the business benefits you want from cloud adoption with less risk, avoiding any potential friction when you go into the cloud.

To smooth your transition, even more, consider working with a trusted partner to not only help you go through the adoption framework but assist with migration and optimisation going forward.

Why Pulsant Managed AWS?

As a certified AWS Managed Service Provider and Advanced Consulting Partner, Pulsant offers access to a wealth of cloud expertise, AWS and other cloud knowledge. Our Managed AWS solution is designed by our experienced and expert team of architects and engineers to enhance your business and drive value by meeting your specific requirements.

Working with the right partner who has the experience and tools to understand your business and customise your journey is the way to ensure the best chance of success with AWS.

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Since the advent of cloud, vendors have been waxing lyrical about the benefits of the technology. But as we move further down the adoption curve — where cloud is a given — it’s worth taking another look at those benefits to ensure that your business is realising them.

We all know there needs to be a compelling reason to move to cloud in the first place, whether that’s a data centre that’s run out of space, replacing legacy servers or taking something off-premise. It can be used for different things as well, like hosting your email, software development, big data analytics or disaster recovery.

Whatever the reason, are you getting all you can out of your cloud infrastructure?

Looking specifically at AWS, the benefits include agility and elasticity, cost savings, and ease of deployment.

Flexibility is key — being able to scale up or down as you need to i cost-effectively means you can meet the changing needs of your business without breaking the bank or committing to infrastructure that you don’t need.

Costs are cut — if your infrastructure is managed correctly, there are significant cost benefits of using AWS. The obvious benefit is the fact you’re moving to a service model instead of investing in hardware, but there are other savings associated with adoption as well, like the fact you’re only paying for what you’re using and can enjoy lower prices due to economies of scale.

Speed to market — with so many services, APIs and systems already designed for the cloud, getting set and started is quick and easy. From an AWS perspective, this is especially true considering the company has global infrastructure so your deployed applications will always be close to the end-user, which reduced latency and boosts the experience.

The Pulsant benefit

At Pulsant we design, deploy and manage intelligent cloud platforms that enable your growth, spur innovation and support your success. All while remaining secure and compliant. We have a wealth of expertise in cloud and managed hosting, with high-performance infrastructure to match. Our team of AWS solution architects will understand your business and IT challenges and is well placed to work with you to make sure you’re getting the most value from your AWS deployment.

Our Managed AWS service monitors and manages your infrastructure, using next-generation cloud tools. This includes managing access control and identity management for security and traceability; backup services; and carrying out preventative maintenance, as well as preventative security maintenance.

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Edinburgh, UK – 19 August 2019 – Pulsant, a leading UK provider of hybrid cloud services, has been awarded a place on the Scottish Government’s newly launched Cloud Services Framework. The framework has been designed to help Scottish public and third sector organisations maximise efficiency and collaboration by aligning with the strategic priorities in Scotland’s Digital Future.

Pulsant is offering its own private, public and hybrid cloud solutions on the framework, as well as hyper-scale cloud services and its colocation services.

“This is a tremendous step forward for the public sector in Scotland and we are delighted to once again be included on the framework and to continue to support organisations in the region,” says John Easson, Head of Sales — public sector and enterprise (Scotland), Pulsant.

Pulsant has a significant presence in Scotland and is the largest colocation provider in the country. Three of its 10 owned and operated data centres are located there, with its South Gyle site the largest in Scotland.

The company already works with a number of public sector organisations in the region, and has a wealth of experience in delivering colocation, cloud and data centre services to customers.

The framework supports digital initiatives in the region, including the Data Hosting and Data Centre Strategy and has replaced the Scottish Government’s four-year Hosting Services Framework.

“Public sector organisations are already using cloud in various forms and enjoying its benefits. Moving forward there will be an increased drive to ensure they are fully capitalising on the cloud opportunity and optimising its usage. This new framework makes it easier for organisations to evaluate suppliers and ensure they can procure the right set of solutions and support — which is a really important step in helping Scotland realise its full potential as a digital nation.”

Pulsant executives will also be on-hand at the Holyrood Connect Cloud Services in the Public Sector Conference on the 18th September 2019 to discuss how Pulsant is helping public sector organisations to transform and optimise their technology investment.

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