Cloud Computing (Private,Public, Hybrid, and MultiCloud)

Enterprise IT teams today are looking for ways to deliver services via on-premises private Cloud with the speed and operational efficiency of public Cloud services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. They are also looking for ways to leverage public Cloud offerings to enhance their portfolios, scale rapidly, and provide lower-cost alternatives for traditional IT services.

The simplicity and flexibility of hyperconverged infrastructure makes it the ideal platform for private Cloud. HCI’s unique ability to run legacy workloads while reducing capital and operational expense combined with its software-defined architecture, the ability to leverage APIs for automation, and support for rapid and incremental scalability, also make it an ideal candidate for Dev-Ops and Cloud-ready, next-generation applications. This, in turn make HCI the ideal platform for hybrid Cloud and MultiCloud infrastructure.

Private Clouds are typically built using infrastructure that is entirely owned and managed by an enterprise.

Public Clouds are publicly accessed and consumed. This means that networking, storage, and compute resources (and often applications) are owned and managed by a third-party provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Though workloads are partitioned for security, these resources are shared by the customers of a particular public Cloud provider.

Hybrid Cloud describes an architecture where an enterprise is combining private and public Cloud resources to deliver IT services to the business. A distinguishing characteristic of hybrid Cloud is the use of a single management plane across Clouds and the option of deploying workloads to either public or private infrastructure based on business needs.

MultiCloud describes an architecture where an enterprise is using private and public Cloud resources to deliver IT services but a single management plane across Clouds is not being used. The Cloud environments are discreet and managed separately. Many businesses using SaaS offerings are leveraging this architecture.        

Why do businesses want a hybrid cloud environment? Businesses might require a hybrid Cloud for a variety of reasons, some of which are listed here.

• Resource Management > Some Businesses want to take advantage of low-cost infrastructure, large scale, or specialized services that can only be provided by public Cloud. They may also need to manage the resources in their on-prem and Cloud hosted environments using the same tools. 
• Migration > Companies that are migrating from a complete on-prem solution to a configuration that incorporates some usage of public Cloud capacity may use a hybrid Cloud architecture to maintain control of the workloads placed in the public Cloud.
• Reverse Migration > Organizations that are moving workloads back to a private, on-prem datacenter from being primarily Cloud-based (a process called repatriation) would want to manage workloads from the single management plane provided by a hybrid Cloud solution.
• Security > Maintaining the level of security required to protect applications and data requires strict control over who has access. Regulations can determine where data is stored, and how long it needs to be retained. Hybrid Cloud architecture can provide the necessary control and audit capability for an infrastructure that spans private and public domains.

Identify what you are already doing in the cloud

Hybrid Cloud infrastructure provides almost unlimited flexibility for organizations. Offerings range from colocation, where everything from the power plug out is provisioned and managed by the enterprise to software as a service (SaaS), where everything but the data is controlled by the provider – and all points in between. An enterprise can enjoy the enhanced security of on-prem resources while also having the rapid scale and elasticity of the public Cloud. And, with a properly constructed hybrid Cloud, encrypted data sharing enables industries that manage hypersensitive information such as public sector entities, law offices, financial service institutions, and healthcare providers to consume Cloud services where regulations allow.

Organizations from these industries can store and share data as needed with external partners while still adhering to regulatory compliance guidelines such as HIPAA, ISO, PCI-DSS, CIS, NiST, and SOC-2.