Cloud bursting has been difficult for many businesses to achieve. While the ability to share data and processing between on premises and public cloud resources offers a cost-effective method of coping with spikes in demand, establishing an environment that supports that transfer is challenging. You effectively perform a cloud migration every time you need to call on that additional capacity; for cloud bursting to work, that migration needs to be heavily automated; and you may need to redesign the on-site applications to cope with shared processing.
As a result, cloud bursting remains more of a concept than an established practice. However, there are other reasons to look at hybrid cloud even if you don’t implement cloud bursting.
Hybrid Cloud Use Beyond Cloud Bursting
There are several scenarios where hybrid cloud can meet business needs or yield cost savings without the complexity of cloud bursting. These scenarios generally use a looser definition of hybrid cloud, where the on-site resources don’t even need to be a true private cloud, eliminating another source of complexity and challenge. Instead, on-premises resources are loosely integrated with public cloud, drawing on additional resources to support specific applications. You may already be using this hybrid IT design without having made a strategic decision to do so.
- Big data analytics. Big data analytics projects often have short lifespans, so it’s hard to justify investing in large server farms to do the processing. With hybrid cloud, the data collected on-premises can remain on-premises until an analytics project is underway. The data can then be transferred to the cloud and computing resources accessed for the duration of the project.
- Development and test environments. Development and test can take place in the public cloud, then migrated to the on premises environment for production. Package your builds as containers to ensure the deployments succeed wherever they’re deployed. There’s no need for production data to leave the data center.
- Disaster recovery. Cloud backups and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) are among the easiest and most beneficial ways to get started with hybrid cloud. Using cloud for backup means there’s no need to build a secondary site that mirrors your data center, while DRaaS helps automate and speed up the recovery process. Businesses that remain concerned about moving sensitive data off premises can choose to use public cloud to backup less sensitive data and use traditional approaches to protecting the rest.
Even without cloud bursting, using hybrid cloud effectively requires a strategic plan and implementation that considers data requirements and potential changes to application design. The professional services team at dcVAST helps businesses understand their requirements and designs solutions to meet those needs. Through product support and managed services, we’re able to offer 24×7 support to ensure hybrid cloud solutions run at optimum efficiency. Contact us to learn more about integrating cloud services with your on premises solutions.
