Adopting a hybrid cloud philosophy can provide businesses with the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. A hybrid cloud is the concept of working with both an on-premise private cloud and various public clouds. While cost reduction is a primary goal, businesses also benefit from gaining a flexible IT infrastructure and significant scalability. The tools available for working in both public and private clouds can maximize the efficiency of working on digital projects. By spreading workloads between both private and public clouds, businesses gain greater flexibility and more ways to use their data.

The evolution of hybrid clouds is based on convenience, expanded inexpensive services, and the flexibility of using different clouds with different tools. By selecting the public cloud most appropriate for the project, organizations can take advantage of Big Data research, customer analytics, and sophisticated machine learning tools.

Separating the Workloads

The hybrid cloud offers the best of public and private cloud environments. Organizations can decide which aspects of their business they want in each environment, allowing them to take advantage of all the benefits. Businesses can work on non-sensitive projects and operations in the public environment, and still ensure critical data remains safe in the private cloud. A hybrid model is an especially good fit for businesses with fluctuating income schedules, and those that deal with confidential information.

Scalability within a private cloud is based on the amount of storage available, and significant investments may have to be made to increase storage. However, this is not necessary with public clouds because they come with almost unlimited scalability, at no extra charge. This is a benefit hybrid clouds can take full advantage of. It is a quick and easy solution that does not place a significant burden on the organization’s budget.

Prepping for the Hybrid Cloud

Before choosing a cloud, and the most appropriate tools for a project, a clear understanding of the organization’s computing system and the project’s goals are needed. The work habits of everyone using the services should also be included. With this knowledge, a proper evaluation of each service offered by a cloud can be made. Other considerations include the cost, knowledge of the cloud, and data security issues.

A reasonable self-evaluation program can determine which workloads are the best fit for each cloud environment. It is important to match the correct tools and resources with the correct project and cloud. Organizations shouldn’t be afraid to start small! After gaining experience with the new cloud environment, larger projects can worked on, comfortably.

Public cloud architecture can be broken down into three service models to choose from:

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), where the provider hosts the application services and offers them to customers over the internet.

• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provides hardware and software tools, typically for application development.

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offers virtualized computing, for example VMs and storage, by way of the internet.

Tools and Processes for Maximizing the Cloud

By combining private clouds with public clouds, an organization can run more efficiently and offer a greater variety of services to their customers. The majority of public cloud services offer a large and continuously expanding array of tools to promote efficiency when working with data, files, documents, and content. Additionally, there are processes and tools supporting the efficient use of both public and private clouds.

• Optimizing storage environments: Data control is new to the cloud. It requires creating data tiers and then assigning data to the right place for storage.

• WANop and load-balancing: WAN stands for “Wide Area Network,” and WANop stands for WAN optimization. WANop allows control of the traffic flow between data center locations and supports smart load-balancing.

• AtomSphere: a cloud-based software PaaS used to integrate various cloud-based applications with each other and with on-premise applications.

• Chef: an open source Ruby-based product designed to configure virtual systems, which cuts down on tedious, repetitive, manual operations.

• Monitoring and management platforms: A monitoring and management platform offers a proactive system, allowing issues to be caught before becoming major problems. Currently, cloud management platforms cover several data centers, locations, and workloads.

• The ParkMyCloud tool: Increases scalability and control, automates scheduled on and off times, and manages multiple public cloud accounts. It also provides a single view for all resources (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform accounts, and includes pricing options).

Choosing a Cloud

Kinsta uses the Google Cloud platform. It is inexpensive and its infrastructure is secure and can handle thousands of connections simultaneously. Kinsta is a WordPress hosting provider focused on helping with all website needs.

Data Lake Analytics is a Microsoft Cloud. It uses YARN (the core of Hadoop), but is focused on ease of use. It integrates Microsoft tools such as Azure Active Directory and Visual Studio. The platform processes most management tasks automatically. Pricing is different—based on the job, not the number of hours—making it much easier to predict costs.

Kamatera offers very low-maintenance, high-performance cloud platform services. The cost is considered very low for their services. Their charges are based only on what is used. They offer a 30-day free trial period.

AWS is described as the safest cloud platform and offers a wide variety of services that can be used to build complex trustworthy applications. Free training offering unlimited access to over than 100 courses is available at aws.training.

Microsoft Azure is generally used for designing and managing applications, using a worldwide network. Their cloud supports a variety of databases, operating systems, tools, and programming languages. Microsoft Azure offers free services for 12 months.

The Google Cloud Platform uses computers, virtual machines, and hard disks located at various Google data centers. Their platform is an integrated storage, which is used by developers and businesses for live data. Their services are available using various flexible payment plans on a Pay-As-You-Go system. The Google Cloud Platform Free Tier offers a free 12-month trial with a $300 credit for any GCP services, or Always Free (free limited access to several common GCP resources).

Adobe Creative Cloud offers an SaaS, with access to tools that edit videos, photographs, and graphic designs. Adobe Experience Cloud provides access to solutions for advertising and gaining Business Intelligence.

VMware’s Cloud platform helps in simplifying IT. They are safe and offer storage, networking, and disaster recovery, etc. They combine the services and technologies needed for operating a business and managing the staff and offer app management services.

The IBM Cloud offers the ability to select and merge a variety tools and data models in designing next-generation applications and services. The IBM Cloud is used to build novel projects.

Rackspace Cloud offers services like hosting web applications, cloud files, cloud block storage, cloud backup, databases and cloud servers, etc. They use encryption and compression techniques and offer file-level backups at low cost.

The Red Hat platform uses open-source technology to deliver flexible solutions. This platform is used to modernize apps, manage them, and integrate all of its parts into one solution. Can be used to help build and manage a private cloud at low cost.

Salesforce Cloud Computing offers applications used by businesses to support customer service, mobile applications, sales, and marketing. Their platform supports multiple cloud services, such as sales cloud, marketing cloud, service cloud, and more. Their services help manage the automation of business processes, the customer’s contact information, etc.

The Oracle Cloud helps businesses become more efficient and simplify their IT. The Oracle Cloud helps independent developers and IT Enterprises to create, connect, and share data. They offer a variety of subscription-based, integrated services that can help run large workloads. They are currently offering up to 3500 hours for free.

SAP uses a universal foundation, called SAP HANA for its cloud services. It is known for modernizing the way businesses use iPhones and iPads. SAP has a strong following due to its powerful business networks, advanced IT security, and cloud collaboration.

Egnyte offers cloud storage, and can upload files of any type or size. A unique customized Egnyte domain can be created, showing a logo on the interface and note headers. Their platform comes with an automatic syncing feature that guarantees access to the inaccessible data from any internet connection.

No matter the choices of how to best utilize a hybrid cloud in your organization, there are multiple option, as well as multi-cloud solutions as well.

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