What is a Hybrid Cloud?

Businesses who require the security and control of a Private Cloud infrastructure will sometimes need to enhance this with Public Cloud services to cope with high load or perhaps to outsource the less critical functions such as test and development environments or archive data storage.   Occasionally businesses will need additional computing power beyond what is available within their Private Cloud infrastructure.   This is the definition of Hybrid Cloud.

Before reading the rest of this article it is worth reading these previous two articles on Public Cloud and Private Cloud.   Hybrid Cloud is basically a combination of these two approaches.   

Hybrid Cloud for Small Businesses

A common Hybrid Cloud scenario may be where most applications are running within the boundaries of Private Cloud but email is running in Microsoft’s Office 365 service.

So what is Hybrid Cloud as far as small businesses are concerned?   Sometimes Hybrid Cloud is considered a combination of Public Cloud services and a traditional on-premise solution.   For small businesses this is likely to be the most common scenario; whether it meets the common definition of Hybrid Cloud is irrelevant, it is about finding the most appropriate and flexible solution to meet the demands of the business.

Typical Hybrid Cloud scenario

As an example, consider a small business of about 30 – 40 employees, they run most things on site, have a server than looks after logons and security and is used to store all the company’s shared documents as well as their Sage database.   The company uses a Hosted Exchange service for email and calendaring, so they are already partly running a hybrid infrastructure.

The business needs to upgrade their accounts to Sage 200.  Their existing server isn’t powerful enough to run this so they would potentially need to buy a new server and also purchase licences for Microsoft SQL Server.   To save on upfront investment costs the company chooses to go with a Public Cloud solution running hosted desktops (hosted terminal servers) that also provides a hosted SQL Server in their datacentre, which they can pay for as a monthly subscription.   From the hosted desktop they can access their local drives and mapped drives so the system seamlessly integrates with their existing on-premise systems.   In the future they could move all their applications to the hosted desktop and negate the need for any local servers.

Another Hybrid Cloud example is a business running a hosted Private Cloud infrastructure where they rent dedicated physical servers which run virtual servers for their various applications.   Using the Your Office Anywhere Private Managed Cloud they have the ability to move virtual machines onto other physical hardware in the Public Cloud sphere in the event of a hardware failure.

Cloud computing is all about flexibility, finding the most appropriate architecture for your business, large or small.   For many small businesses the choices may be straightforward; for others with complex needs or a highly regulated environment then more research will be required.

Learn more about Hybrid Cloud & contact us today

This article on What is Hybrid Cloud is meant to fairly high level, as are the two preceding articles on Public and Private Cloud.    As a business you may already be using some public or private cloud services, or a combination already, but if you are looking to find out more about how Cloud Computing can help your business speak to one of our technical sales consultants and let us know what your business needs from its IT.  Call us on 01282 500318, or contact us here.

Read further related articles:

What Is Public Cloud?

What Is Private Cloud?