By Charles Wilson
What is Hybrid Cloud?
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Hybrid Cloud is a “cloud infrastructure that is made up of a composite of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remains unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability.”
Two or more cloud environments working together, in other words.
Hybrid Cloud provides real benefits to the enterprise:
- Capitalizing on lower cost for infrastructure services
- Integrating public cloud compute with onsite enterprise hardware and on-premise cloud hardware, providing speed to market of enterprise services to customers
- Leveraging enterprise security features such as federated single sign-on using directory services
- Providing secure data integration allowing enterprises to have a single view of their data regardless of its physical location
- Scaling over-utilized enterprise systems out to the public cloud in a cost-efficient manner, providing the enterprise with on-demand capacity.
Hybrid cloud provides the technologies that enable enterprises to leverage secure dedicated direct connections with cloud service provides, which allows enterprise data to flow to and from public cloud services providers completely encrypted and in a secure manner. That means enterprises can leverage cloud services while continuing to meet government and industry standards.
Hybrid Cloud got a boost In October 2018 when IBM announced it would acquire Open Source software provider Red Hat. This was IBM’s way of letting the tech industry know that hybrid cloud was going to be the next big push.
The acquisition was recently approved by regulators and should be completed later this year.
IBM is acquiring Red Hat because Red Hat has developed, and provides, major technologies for enterprises to embrace hybrid cloud. Such as:
- Enterprise Linux, a world class enterprise operating system that has the capabilities to run virtual workloads and scale out private and public cloud compute infrastructures.
- OpenShift, an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform that provides a full stack for automating operations and managing hybrid cloud container services.
- OpenStack Platform, a cloud computing platform that provides tools for virtualizing compute and storage services, including automation and management tools for automating the deployment of virtualized computing.
- CloudForms, an infrastructure management platform that allows IT to control users and provide self-service capabilities to provision and manage compliance and standards across virtual machines and private clouds.
These products provide a complete platform for Hybrid Cloud. Redhat Enterprise Linux 8 provides the capability to move workloads from on premise to public cloud services providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. This gives enterprises the ability to leverage the low cost and services that public cloud services providers offer.
By now it should be obvious that Hybrid Cloud is not the future; it is now. Enterprises need to embrace Hybrid Cloud in order to lower cost of operations, scale services as fast as their customers demand and, most of all, use billions of dollars already invested into public cloud services in the enterprise.
When your enterprise is ready to discuss how Hybrid Cloud will fit, LRS IT Solutions has a Cloud Practice dedicated to providing services including gathering requirements and designing a cost-effective Hybrid Cloud solution for your enterprise. Use the form below to contact us.
About the author
Charles Wilson is our Cloud Solutions Advisor. He has extensive experience in designing and implementing cloud solutions for companies in such industries as financial services, real estate, manufacturing, and retail. He holds certifications as an IBM Certified Enterprise Architect, AWS Technical Professional, and AWS TCO and Cloud Economics.