Hybrid cloud to the rescue

Hybrid cloud is seen by many as a way to overcome fear, concerns or barriers preventing the adoption of public cloud computing. A hybrid cloud is one step into the cold water of cloud without getting your feet too wet, and having a way out when things go wrong.

Compare it to starting a relationship with someone without selling your house and moving in with your new partner. Hybrid cloud is like a two-household family; you enjoy each other's company but still have your own habitat that you have control over. It is also a matter of not putting all of your eggs in the same basket. If it is the love of your life you can always start living together.

Using hybrid cloud is the same. It enables you to withdraw virtual machines if services of cloud providers are not meeting expectations or are even terminated like in the case of Nirvanix we mentioned earlier. There is an escape plan.

Another benefit of hybrid cloud is that the organization still employs people with knowledge on infrastructures. Suppose an organization moves its IT fully to a public cloud. It's likely that the number of staff with infrastructure knowledge will be reduced, as the organization does not require that knowledge anymore.

Using a hybrid cloud, IT departments are able to control their IT while at the same time are able to provide an unlimited capacity to their business without having to spend a lot of money on buying new infrastructure.

Hybrid cloud also enables a controlled move towards public cloud. Not many organizations are willing and able to perform a kind of big bang migration scenario in which all of their IT services are moved to the cloud in a short time frame.

It helps when both infrastructures can be managed using the same tools to provide a single pane of glass. In the ideal world there is no difference between features offered by your on premise platform, and the features offered by the platform of the service provider. However, we will soon find out there are some differences.

Hybrid cloud also offers a choice of where to run the virtual machines. Some virtual machines, like those with sensitive data, rather run in the on premise data center that organizations have full control over. Other types of workloads, such as testing and development, can perfectly run in a public cloud.

One of the clearest examples of a hybrid cloud scenario is one where compute capacity is consumed from a public cloud while the data for that compute is located on on-premises storage systems. Microsoft ExpressRoute which offers up to 10 Gbps connections enable these kind of scenarios.

In the next section, we will learn what the vision of Microsoft is for hybrid cloud and what solutions are available to create and operate a hybrid cloud.