Hybrid Cloud

What is Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid cloud, at its best, seamlessly combines on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and public cloud resources, providing flexibility for organizations to manage workloads across diverse environments. This type of environment typically involves a connection from an on-premises data center to a public cloud and may also involve other private assets, including edge devices. This approach allows businesses to maintain control over sensitive data while utilizing the scalability and innovation offered by public cloud services, adapting to evolving IT needs.

Hybrid cloud is how many enterprises first start with cloud. Traditionally, organizations bought and ran their own infrastructure on-premises, they bought servers installed operating systems and applications on those servers and were responsible for updating and maintaining everything – both software and hardware.

Hybrid cloud is the practice of running some (but only _some_ – not all) of what could be on-premises on someone else’s computers usually in cloud, and usually a big public cloud such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), whilst retaining some of your workloads on-prem. In practice this could mean rather than buying a new Dell Server and installing Microsoft SQL Server to run databases that an organization rents virtual servers as VMs from the Microsoft Azure cloud and installs / maintains SQL server as they do on-prem (IaaS), or it could mean they use an Azure Managed SQL (PaaS) instance where Microsoft are also responsible for maintaining the SQL software.

Whereas Cloud is often coined as running “your applications on someone else’s computer”, hybrid cloud is about running “only some of your applications on somebody else’s computer”.

Hybrid cloud is often a result of an organization’s desire to move to a cloud-first or cloud-only model where practical considerations and constraints mean that some application workloads and / or infrastructure must be retained on-premises. Security concerns and data localization and compliance are common reasons why organizations are forced to retain on-premises IT infrastructure, application performance can also be a factor.

You may like to read about some of the factors that determine whether hybrid cloud is the best solution for an organization or use case, see: On-premises, Cloud First or Cloud Repatriation - What's the Trend? Which is Best? | eG Innovations.

How popular is Hybrid Cloud?

Google Cloud released a collection of statistics on cloud usage in 2023, see: 40 cloud computing stats and trends to know in 2023 | Google Cloud Blog. This included details on hybrid cloud usage such as: “Some 26% of people reported using multiple public clouds in 2022, up from 21% in 2021. Hybrid cloud use also increased from 25% to 42.5%.”

Hybrid Cloud options – public cloud On-premises

The big hyperscale public cloud providers recognize that many of their customers have a need to retain some on-premises infrastructure and workloads. As such many now offer products that allow customers to effectively deploy the public cloud on-prem, on the customers own infrastructure. Examples of this type of hybrid cloud platform include AWS Outposts, Azure HCI / Azure Stack, Azure Arc, Azure VMware Solution, Google Anthos, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, and VMware Cloud Foundation.

What is the difference between Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud?

Hybrid cloud integrates on-premises infrastructure with public and/or private cloud services, enabling data and application portability across different environments. It emphasizes a unified infrastructure where organizations can balance the benefits of both on-premises and cloud resources. In contrast, multi-cloud involves leveraging services from different cloud providers simultaneously, sometimes prioritizing diversity in service selection over integration with on-premises infrastructure. The focus is on strategically choosing the best-fit solutions from various providers to meet specific business needs. Both hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies offer flexibility, scalability, and the ability to optimize services, providing organizations with options to tailor their IT infrastructure according to their unique requirements and objectives.

It is not uncommon for organizations to adopt both a multi-cloud and a hybrid cloud strategy, a route that can be challenging when implementing monitoring and management tools.

Hybrid and Multi-Cloud are sometimes discussed in the context of “Supercloud”, for more detail on the nuances of and variations on these models, see: What is Supercloud? What to consider when monitoring and observing a Supercloud? | eG Innovations.

What are the advantages of Hybrid Cloud? What are the benefits of Hybrid Cloud?

The advantages and benefits of hybrid cloud include:

Flexibility: Enables organizations to scale resources seamlessly, blending private and public clouds based on varying workloads. Cloud-bursting is useful for fixed-length projects or organizations with seasonal variations (e.g. the term vacation cycles seen in universities and education, or the surges retail eCommerce sites see around holidays and Black Friday type events).
Cost Efficiency: Optimizes costs by utilizing pay-as-you-go models for non-sensitive workloads in the public cloud while maintaining critical data in a private cloud.
Security: Safeguards sensitive data within the private cloud / on-premises, addressing security and compliance concerns.
Disaster Recovery: Facilitates robust disaster recovery and business continuity plans by replicating data between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud. Business continuity, high-availability and back-up services are significant drivers for businesses to adopt public cloud.
Customization: Retaining some on-premises infrastructure means control over that infrastructure, allowing for tailored solutions to meet specific performance, security, and compliance requirements.
Innovation: Supports rapid deployment and innovation by leveraging public cloud resources for development and testing before transitioning to a private cloud for production.
Global Reach: Facilitates geographical reach by allowing organizations to choose data center locations based on regulatory requirements or to optimize latency.
Resource Optimization: Optimizes resource usage by efficiently distributing workloads across different environments, adapting to varying demand.
Reduced infrastructure and software maintenance overheads: Reduces the need for experienced staff with certain skillsets. Software licensing administration is often reduced.

What are the disadvantages of Hybrid Cloud?

While hybrid cloud offers numerous advantages, it also comes with certain disadvantages:

Complexity: Managing both private and public cloud environments can be intricate.
Integration Challenges: Achieving seamless integration between on-premises and public cloud services is often challenging.
Cloud can be a Black Box: Moving some workloads to the cloud means you lose access to information especially with respect to infrastructure. We have an insightful real customer case study regarding an incident on AWS and the challenges a customer faced in identifying it was indeed a cloud problem, see: AWS Cloud Case Study: Troubleshooting Application Performance (eginnovations.com).
Security Concerns: Coordinating security measures across different environments may introduce vulnerabilities.
Data Governance: Maintaining consistent data governance policies across diverse platforms can be complex.
Cost Management: Balancing costs can be challenging, with unexpected expenses for data transfer, integration, and management. Data transfer costs are commonly overlooked and can be an unwelcome surprise if not planned for, see: The Mysteries About Cloud Data Transfer Costs (cassinfo.com).
Dependency on Connectivity: Some hybrid cloud architectures rely on stable internet connectivity, and performance or service can be disrupted during connectivity issues. Implementing failover and resilience to avoid such dependencies can be costly and complex adding to costs.
Staff Training: Whilst a hybrid strategy can remove the need for certain staff skills and resources a hybrid strategy does require a skilled workforce with expertise in both on-premises and cloud technologies.
Regulatory Compliance: Meeting regulatory requirements across different regions requires careful planning. Cloud SLAs can also vary between regions making it harder to set global KPIs for organizations spanning multiple geographies.

What Workloads are typically retained On-prem in Hybrid Cloud environments?

Workloads commonly retained on-premises in a hybrid cloud environment include:

Sensitive Data Processing and Regulatory Compliance: Workloads dealing with highly sensitive information, such as personal or financial data, are often kept on-premises to maintain tighter control over security and meet regulatory requirements of standards such as PCI DSS. Industries with stringent regulatory requirements, such as healthcare or finance, may choose to keep certain workloads on-premises to comply with data protection, data localization and privacy regulations.
Legacy Applications: Older applications that are not easily portable to the cloud or require significant modifications may remain on-premises due to compatibility and cost considerations.
High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Graphically Intensive Apps: Workloads that demand exceptional computing power and low-latency access to specialized hardware may be better suited to on-premises environments.
Customized Infrastructure: Applications that rely on specific hardware configurations, specialized networking, or customized infrastructure may be challenging to migrate to the cloud and are often kept on-premises.
Mission-Critical Applications: Critical applications where organizations prioritize maximum control, reliability, and availability may be kept on-premises to avoid potential issues related to cloud service disruptions and outages.

What are the challenges when monitoring Hybrid Cloud?

Once an organization has adopted a hybrid strategy, they often face challenges unifying and synchronizing their on-prem components with their cloud components and usually end up supporting some sort of cloud connector architecture; for example: it is very common to see organizations using on-prem Active Directory in conjunction with Azure AD (Entra ID) connected via Azure AD Connector. Monitoring and troubleshooting these architectures becomes challenging as the native cloud monitoring tools such as Azure Monitor do not cover those on-prem dependencies such as Active Directory. This is why organizations leveraging hybrid cloud usually turn to a third-party monitoring solution such as eG Enterprise designed for hybrid cloud.

A good cloud observability platform such as eG Enterprise offers features that overcome the challenges of visibility of hybrid cloud environments, such as:

Unified Visibility: An effective monitoring tool should provide a unified view, enabling administrators to monitor on-premises and multi-cloud environments from a centralized dashboard, simplifying oversight.
Scalability and Real-time Monitoring: The tool must be scalable to accommodate fluctuating workloads and offer real-time monitoring for immediate insights into the performance and health of hybrid infrastructure.
Cost Monitoring and Optimization: Including features for tracking resource usage and associated costs across different cloud providers, the tool helps optimize expenses and manage budgets efficiently.
Automation and Orchestration: AIOps capabilities streamline workflows, allowing the tool to respond automatically to events or alerts, improving operational efficiency and minimizing manual intervention.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM): APM features are essential for monitoring application performance across hybrid environments, ensuring optimal operation and meeting service level objectives for critical business applications.
Integration and Extensibility: The monitoring tool should integrate seamlessly with cloud-native services, offer API access for flexibility, and support extensibility to adapt to evolving hybrid cloud architectures and diverse toolsets.

How do AIOps capabilities benefit the monitoring of Hybrid Cloud environments?

Using a monitoring tool with AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) capabilities is essential when monitoring hybrid cloud environments due to its ability to leverage advanced analytics and automation. AIOps enhances the monitoring process by detecting patterns, predicting potential issues, and automating responses. In the dynamic and complex nature of hybrid clouds, AIOps helps in proactive issue identification, reducing downtime, improving system performance, and optimizing resource utilization. This capability is key to managing the scale and complexity of hybrid cloud architectures, ensuring efficient operations, and providing timely insights for informed decision-making.