Hybrid Cloud Storage Architecture and Use Cases

What is Hybrid Cloud?

As the name implies, the hybrid cloud combines the benefits of both the private cloud and the public cloud. It delivers the high-security features of private cloud merge with the fast connection and easy-to-access features of the public cloud. Even if the public and private segments of the hybrid cloud are bound together, they remain unique entities. This allows the hybrid cloud to offer the benefits of multiple deployment models at once.

Importance of Hybrid Cloud

• Elimination of DDOS(Distributed Denial of Service) Attacks
• Data Management
• Increased Security and Reduction in Risk
• Cost Optimization
• Similar to Private Cloud

Benefits of Hybrid Cloud

• It’s highly scalable
• Hybrid cloud is more secure
• Better agility
• Cost-efficient

The architecture of Hybrid Cloud: Architecture of hybrid cloud operates upon three primary components of a modern cloud computing environment, which are as follows -

• Public cloud infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform such as Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
• The development of a private cloud either through a hosted private cloud provider or on-premises.
• Sufficient wide-area network (WAN) connectivity between the two above two environments.

Use Cases Of Hybrid Cloud

Disaster Recovery and High Availability — Setting an Independent environment for disaster recovery can be very costly. With the use of a hybrid cloud setup where the on-premises data center fails over to a public cloud services in the case of emergency, it is much more affordable.

Archive — The cloud archive is a storage as a service for a long term data store.

Cloud bursting — It is an application deployment model in which an application runs in a data center or private cloud and breach into a public cloud when the request of computing capacity spikes. The advantage of such a hybrid cloud deployment is that an organization only pays for extra resources whey they are needed.

Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Solutions

Value Creation — By the uses of better resource management, your employees can complete tasks on time and are available to do more task that makes your business more profitable.

Agile Business — Gain the flexibility to scale your infrastructure resource as per your need.

Why should any organization choose hybrid cloud solutions?

• Hybrid cloud solutions offer flexibility in deployment
• The best-in-class hardware, software, and services according to your business requirements
• Hybrid Cloud Solutions Can Decrease Operating Costs
• Hybrid Cloud Improves Compliance

Why we need Hybrid Cloud solutions

Public cloud — Public cloud is based on the standard cloud computing model In which your data stored in the provider’s data center, and the provider is accountable for the administration and maintenance of the data center. Public cloud is ideal for small and medium sized business or a business that have fluctuating demands. The public cloud is a low cost.

Advantages of public cloud

Public Cloud Use Cases

• Infrastructure Scaling
• Platform Development
• Hosted Services

Private Cloud — A private cloud hosting solution, also known as an internal or enterprise cloud, tenants on the company’s intranet or hosted data center where all of the client data is protected behind a firewall. A private cloud is best suitable for larger businesses or those with strict data, regulation, and governance obligations.

There are two variations of a private cloud -

On-premise Private Cloud — This type of cloud is hosted within an organization own facility. They are extremely used for applications that require complete control and configuration of the infrastructure and security.

Externally Hosted Private Cloud — Externally hosted private cloud are also exclusively used by one organization but are hosted by a third party specializing in cloud infrastructure.

Advantages of a private cloud

• Get more flexible by which any organisation can customize its cloud environment to meet specific business needs.
• Security
• More Control

Private cloud Use Cases

• SaaS
• Expanding computing capacity
• Application development and testing

Some Hybrid Cloud Solutions Providers: Hybrid Cloud Computing environment is now adopted by organizations to manage workloads on-premises as well as externally. With on-demand availability of public as well as private cloud, hybrid cloud suit most enterprises. The hybrid model provides businesses with a competitive edge through some on- Demand services, the ability to switch between clouds, and flexible high-end solutions such as -

• Cloud Integration
• Cloud Management
• Cloud Security
• Automation
• Networking
• Consulting

Hybrid cloud solutions are offered by various cloud solutions providers in different service models such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service).

Overview of Microsoft Azure Platform

Microsoft Azure, commonly known as Windows Azure, implements public cloud services that recognize for new cloud application development as great as more regular migration of current enterprise applications to the cloud. It offers many cloud services, including those for compute, analytics, storage, and networking. Users can choose from these services to develop and scale new applications or run the existing application in the public cloud.

The new Cloud Platform System (CPS) from Microsoft can handle traditional infrastructure and sensitive information of organization on-premise through the use of the same management tools as that of the Azure public cloud.

Why Microsoft Azure?

• Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities
• Hybrid Solutions for seamless cloud connectivity
• Security offering
• Integrated environment

Microsoft Azure Services

Compute — These Services enable a user to deploy and manage VM, containers, and batch processing and also support remote application access.

Web — These services support the development and deployment of the web application.

Data Storage — This category of services provides cloud storage for structured and unstructured data.

IoT — These services help users to capture, monitor, and analyze IOT data from sensors and other devices.

Microsoft Azure Use Cases

• IoT Services
• Disaster Recovery
• Feature Testing
• User-Generated Content Hosting
• Product Database And Catalogs

Overview of Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) — AWS is one of the most prominent hybrid cloud solution providers that offer IaaS and PaaS cloud service models. AWS has always been known to provide the best public cloud computing services. For enterprises uses AWS now seamlessly integrates private data centers with public cloud resources through services like Direct Connect. This service reduces network costs and improves bandwidth throughput. For management that needs to integrate data centers (within company firewall) with the public cloud platform to handle top usage spikes, Amazon Web Services enables the integration of on-premises, role-based access control systems like Active Directory with the Amazon Web Services IAM (Identity and Access Management) service.

Hybrid Cloud Architecture of AWS

NAT gateway — NAT refers to (Network address translation) gateway to facilitate instances in a private subnet to correlate to the internet or other AWS services, but prevent the internet from initiating a connection with those instances.

Amazon VPC — VPC refers to Virtual Private Cloud. It enables you to lunch AWS resources into a virtual that you have defined. This virtual network closely parallels a traditional network that you had work in your own data center, with the advantages of using the scalable infrastructure of AWS.

Benefits of AWS

• Easy to use
• Flexible
• Cost-Effective
• Reliable
• Scalable and high-performance
• Secure

Overview of AWS Services

Compute — Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides a virtual server known as instances for compute capacity. EC2 provides no instance types with varying abilities and sizes.

Storage — Amazon Simple Storage Service provides scalable object storage for unstructured data.

Migration, hybrid cloud — AWS offers various tools to help users to migrate applications, database onto its public cloud.

Security — AWS provides a range of services for cloud security; IAM, which allows admin to define user access to resources.

Mobile development — AWS mobile hub provides a collection of tools and services for mobile app development like AWS mobile SDK, which includes code samples and libraries.c

AWS Use Cases

• Backup and Storage — AWS provides low-cost data storage with high durability and availability. AWS provides storage choices for block, object storage.
• Big Data
• Web, Mobile and Social Apps
• Gaming

A Holistic Strategy

To know more about how cloud adoption helps in Cost Reduction, Agility, Flexibility and Availability we recommend taking the following steps -

Originally published at https://www.xenonstack.com on November 11, 2019.