Your data center is likely already a hybrid blend of technologies, with Windows, Linux, virtual machines, SAN and NAS. Bringing in any new technology adds to the complexity and difficulty of managing it. This is particularly true in the case of hybrid cloud, which gives you the complexity of integrating your internal systems with a public cloud outside of your control.
In order to make adding that complexity worth the effort, hybrid cloud needs to return benefits that exceed the costs of coping with the complicated environment. Evaluate your use case for hybrid cloud to make sure there isn’t a simpler solution that would meet your business needs. Here are 4 scenarios that may justify using a hybrid cloud solution:
1. You need a lower cost, more flexible development and test environment.
Development and test environments are critical to your ability to create new applications and gain new business. Developers often need multiple environments to allow them to support production configurations while building new versions. Providing all the configurations in your data center can be complicated to support and costly. Building new environments for development takes time and costs money; this means delays and sometimes wasted infrastructure. Using public cloud for dev and test eliminates those issues; environments can be spun up and shut down as needed, with costs accrued only when the environment is active. Copying virtual machines from cloud to the data center makes it easy to bring the new application to your own data center when it’s ready.
2. Your applications experience predictable spikes in demand.
Cloud bursting can help you handle periodic peaks in demand, such as increased load on retail sites during the holidays or increased load on financial sites at tax time. Using hybrid cloud lets you size your internal resources to handle the typical load and utilize, and pay, for additional capacity in the cloud when you experience the higher seasonal demand. Cloud bursting works best when the higher demand is predictable, because your systems need to be designed to share the workload transparently.
3. You need a simpler approach to disaster recovery.
Using the cloud for disaster recovery (DR) is a great solution. Having your backups in the cloud means they’re easily accessible, and the cloud provider makes sure they’re secure. You can create and transfer backups to the cloud yourself, or use Disaster Recovery as a Service for a supported solution that typically includes automation and reduces the time to achieve recovery. Using the public cloud to support your DR process is typically less expensive than the expenses incurred in building and supporting a second private cloud environment on your own.
4. You’re building a new product or line of business.
If you’re experimenting with a new product offering and you aren’t certain of its success, the public cloud lets you get the product to market without investing in a full-scale production environment in your data center. If the product succeeds, you can migrate it internally and shut down the cloud environment, if that’s your preference; if the product fails, you can shut down the cloud environment without any unneeded hardware left over in your data center.
Does your business have use cases that support the need for hybrid cloud? dcVAST can help you implement that architecture, through Nutanix services to create your private cloud, managed Amazon Web Services to ensure smooth functioning of your public cloud, and our Disaster Recovery as a Service solution. Contact us to build a hybrid cloud that meets your business needs.
