When it comes to choosing a cloud deployment model, most businesses can benefit from a combination of on-premise resources and public cloud services. This is known as a hybrid cloud approach.
In a well-integrated hybrid cloud environment, users can get the services they need regardless of whether they're coming from a private cloud or public cloud, giving your business the best return on its investment.
Multicloud vs. Hybrid Cloud
There are two fundamental cloud deployment models: private cloud and public cloud. Where you locate each workload depends on your business needs, including cost, data governance, and resource availability.
- A private cloud delivers services that are run on your data center infrastructure and maintained by your IT team.
- With the public cloud, you purchase virtualized compute, storage, and networking services over the internet from a cloud service provider, such as Amazon Web Services*, Google Cloud*, and Microsoft Azure*.
Many organizations use a combination of resources from different public cloud service providers. This is known as a multicloud approach, and it can also include resources from your own private cloud.
A hybrid cloud combines public cloud and private cloud environments by allowing data and applications to be shared between them. This helps you seamlessly scale services back and forth between on-premises and off-premises infrastructure.
Benefits of the Hybrid Cloud
A hybrid cloud gives you the best of both the private cloud and public cloud with the flexibility to run workloads where they make the most sense. For example, you can meet specific requirements for data management and reliability with the control you get from your private cloud while getting workload scalability and support for new services with low maintenance from the public cloud.
A multicloud, hybrid cloud strategy built with interoperability and portability in mind gives you the most flexibility with different price points, service offerings, capabilities, and geographic locations. It can also create consistency across your organization, independent of the services being consumed.
A recent survey found that 69 percent of tech professionals use or plan to use cloud services from multiple providers in the next 12 months.1
Hybrid Cloud Use Cases
By placing workloads based on your business needs and drivers, you can get the most value from your hybrid cloud. Hybrid clouds can simplify application deployment through self-service portals and provide greater agility to innovate faster and improve workflow processes. They can also help reduce capital expenses for on-premises infrastructure while providing a pay-as-you-go option for deploying workloads on the public cloud.
Hybrid Cloud Solutions Powered by Intel
Successfully blending private and public clouds requires integration at various levels, including the network, security, application, and dashboard management layers. Sophisticated deployments may also integrate cross-cloud management and orchestration, workload balancing, storage, networking, and other infrastructure.
Intel works to make sure you can use your preferred combination of private cloud and public cloud and still get uncompromised performance on Intel platforms, with the underlying virtualization technology to ensure workloads remain portable and scalable. Intel® technologies power the cloud with processors, networking components, and memory and storage, along with a rich portfolio of enabling technologies, easy-to-deploy cloud solutions, and a broad choice of industry collaborators—including Intel® Select Solutions from our partners.
In addition, Intel works closely with major public cloud service providers—including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure—to optimize performance on the Intel® technologies in their data centers.
Hybrid Cloud Developer Resources
Within a hybrid cloud environment, you'll need to unite individual infrastructure components to manage, automate, and orchestrate your resources. Developers have a variety of resources to choose from, including software for virtualization, orchestration, and containers.
In addition, some of the top cloud service providers now offer their customers private cloud deployment options to help support a multicloud environment and better integration with public cloud services. These include Microsoft Azure Stack, AWS Outposts, Cisco Hybrid Cloud Platform for Google Cloud, and Google Cloud's Anthos.
Moving Forward with a Hybrid Cloud
Many companies will make progress toward a hybrid cloud in small increments, often one application at a time. In some cases, you may initially deploy an application on your private cloud, but then migrate it to the public cloud when demand rises.
To launch a hybrid cloud, you'll need a high-performance platform and robust partner ecosystem for deployment support. Intel® Select Solutions for Hybrid Cloud bring cloud services to your on-premises data center with simple, enhanced deployment. These verified solutions offer tuned and optimized infrastructure for private cloud strategies with software-defined compute, storage, and networking capabilities.