A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services with orchestration between these platforms. This typically involves a connection from an on-premises data center to a public cloud. The connection also can involve other private assets, including edge devices or other clouds.

How do hybrid clouds work?

In a hybrid cloud model, enterprises deploy workloads in private IT environments or public clouds and move between them as computing needs and costs change. This gives a business greater flexibility and more data deployment options. A hybrid cloud workload includes the network, hosting and web service features of an application.

While the terms are sometimes discussed interchangeably, there are key differences between hybrid and multi-cloud models. A hybrid cloud creates a single environment in which to operate on-premises, private resources and in public cloud resources — such as those offered by AWS, Microsoft and Google. A multi-cloud environment consists of two or more public cloud providers but does not require a private or on-premises component.

Hybrid cloud benefits

Hybrid cloud computing enables an enterprise to deploy its most sensitive workloads in an on-premises cloud and to host less-critical resources on a third-party public cloud provider. This approach allows organizations to get the best of both private and public cloud models.

The core benefits of hybrid cloud include the following:

Flexibility. Companies work with various types of data in disparate environments and adjust their infrastructure. A hybrid cloud setup uses traditional systems as well as the latest cloud technology, without a full commitment to a vendor. Organizations can migrate workloads to and from their traditional infrastructure and a vendor’s public cloud whenever necessary.

Cost management. With a private cloud, organizations own and operate the data center infrastructure, which requires significant capital expense and fixed costs. Alternatively, public cloud resources and services are accounted as variable and operational expenses. Hybrid cloud users can choose to run workloads in whichever environment is more cost-effective.

Agility and scalability. Hybrid cloud offers more resource options via a public cloud provider vs. an organization’s physical data center. This makes it easier to provision, deploy and scale resources to meet demand spikes. When demand exceeds capacity of the local data center, an organization can burst the application to the public cloud to access extra scale and capacity.

Resiliency and interoperability. A business can run workloads redundantly in both private and public environments. Components of one workload can also run in both environments and interoperate.

Compliance. Organizations in highly regulated industries must follow restrictions on where data can reside, and this often means they cannot move certain workloads to the public cloud. With hybrid cloud, organizations can keep data in a private environment while operating workloads in the cloud, or they can operate workloads in a private data center and move data to and from the public cloud as needed. This allows companies to meet regulatory requirements and still benefit from the cloud’s elasticity.