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The Trend Toward Hybrid Cloud

Security, control and consistent performance levels are all important reasons why companies are choosing private cloud deployments. But organizations also want to tap into the financial savings and operational agility offered by the public cloud.

Today, cloud solutions can be on-premises, off-premises, private or public; hybrid cloud links at least two of these components in the most seamless, efficient manner. It can offer the stability for supporting legacy applications while also enabling the elasticity and scalability that newer, more dynamic business apps require.

Whether it’s partitioning applications so that components can reside on both public and private servers or the easy migration of workloads between environments, hybrid cloud can offer companies the optimal mix of cost efficiency, security, and application response.

Such capabilities are especially important for high-performance workloads such as big data analytics and scale-out mobile, or for cloud-native applications. In fact, the distributed compute features of hybrid cloud enables organizations to pinpoint exactly which platform will enable the best performance, benefitting both business users and the IT teams responsible for maintenance.

This trend toward hybrid cloud is resulting in the removal of walls that formerly existed between public and private cloud. For example, automation and orchestration management tools are helping to bring together disparate data centers, corporate VPNs and multi-tenant cloud services into a unified whole.

As organizations make the transition, there are essentially three approaches for rehosting applications on hybrid cloud—lift and shift, partitioning and rewriting an application.

  • Lift and shift is the most economical and requires no application changes. An organization simply decides which environment—public or private—best suits the compute requirements of an application.
  • Partitioning takes advantage of the distributive quality of hybrid cloud. Having detailed knowledge of an application enables IT to run distinct application workloads on public and private environments while keeping them in close communication— as though they existed on a single physical system. While it entails costs, partitioning ensures that application components reside in the best compute environment.
  • Rewriting or refactoring an application to a specific set of cloud services ensures that an application is taking advantage of both public and private resources to achieve optimal performance. Granularly redesigning an application can achieve precise resource usage, but it also can be time-consuming, resource-intensive, and costly.

For companies with pre-existing data centers, a hybrid cloud deployment enables them to incorporate external resources into internal IT environments. Moreover, these businesses can continue to leverage their current IT infrastructure investments by employing cloud automation and self-service features. In addition to expanding the potential for rapid scale-up/scale-out capabilities, hybrid cloud ensures that sensitive systems of record remain in the on-site cloud environment.

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For example, IT can monitor and maintain strict controls related to governance. The tight link between public cloud resources and enterprise data centers ensures consistent security in regards to usage policies as well as access. Moreover, the ability to mix and match deployment environments based on performance needs is a critical differentiator from one-size-fits-all public clouds.

There are many important reasons why transitioning to a hybrid cloud has become a compelling trend, including a common IT architecture for both legacy and cloud-native applications, on-demand access, self-service provisioning and extreme scalability. The compute capacity and bare metal alternatives offered by a cloud provider like SoftLayer, an IBM Company, simply adds to that appeal.

The company’s low-latency network enables live workload migration between servers located on different continents, a key attribute that could help customers comply with data residency requirements and create more effective disaster recovery solutions. Moreover, IBM SoftLayer’s recent partnership with VMware increases the number of options for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments worldwide.

Such levels of workload mobility and application continuity are key ingredients of any hybrid cloud model. As more and more companies extend their infrastructures into the cloud, the technologies for managing hybrid cloud will continue to evolve.

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