A hybrid provides services using a mixture of private and public clouds that have been integrated to optimize service. The promise of the hybrid cloud is to provide the local data benefits of the private clouds with the economies, scalability, and on-demand access of the public cloud. The hybrid cloud remains somewhat undefined because it specifies a midway point between the two ends of the continuum of services provided strictly over the Internet and those provided through the data center or on the desktop. Today, almost every enterprise could be said to have an IT infrastructure containing some elements of both extremes. Meshing them into a common structure is what becomes interesting and offers a range of new possibilities in handling local and cloud-based data, but it also introduces a range of complexities in data transfer and integration.
RELATED LINKS:
Cutter Benchmark Review issue, "Cloud Computing and Software as a Service: The Hyper, the Hype, and the Facts" (complimentary download).
"The Truth About Cloud Computing: Adoption Strategies, Security, and Reliability."
In its most mature form, the hybrid cloud is a private cloud linked to one or more external cloud services, centrally managed, provisioned as a single unit, and circumscribed by a secure network (see Figure 1). Each cloud will have a similar infrastructure and will be based on standards permitting interoperability, making it possible to optimize processing and data location according to such issues as load-balancing requirements, regulatory and security concerns, efficiency of operation, and data-transfer necessities. Each cloud will be used for different purposes, depending on available services and costs, and movement between clouds will be simple and relatively painless.
Figure 1 -- The hybrid cloud: integrating multiple clouds in a secure network.
This vision of the hybrid cloud is, at present, a projection. Currently, interoperability is somewhat limited at various points, including at the virtualization hypervisor level; data transfer also remains problematic, as is integration between applications in separate clouds. But these problems are being worked on, and market demand will help to ensure integration.
IMPLEMENTING CLOUD-BASED SERVICES
In fitting public cloud services into existing IT infrastructure, several important issues need to be considered:
- Level of integration required with existing infrastructure, including any need to share data with applications, to access data from local storage, or to store data locally
- Available infrastructure services in the cloud, such as data protection, cloud-based storage, and complementary services
- Requirements for data transfer to and from the cloud and resultant networking needs
- Compatibility of cloud services with existing programs and data storage, including any requirement for data migration or conversion
- Licensing issues that might affect the use of cloud-based services or limit ability to integrate these services with existing infrastructure
- Compliance issues in ensuring that the provided services meet needs for transparency, auditability, and security that are relevant to your firm's operations
- Vendor operations, including business practices, stability, service-oriented architecture (SOA), security, as well as backup and disaster recovery
Requirements will vary depending on the services needed. Where the object is simply to source virtual machines for testing purpose, for example, there are likely to be relatively few concerns, and the emphasis must be on simplicity. However, when the object is thousands of workstations and the basic desktop services to be used by the firm, it is clearly important to make sure there are service guarantees in place and that the solution is capable of meeting requirements.
HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS
Convergence in a number of areas within the data center environment has created a new vision of infrastructure, bringing together several technologies based on virtualization to create a seamless, secure, and scalable platform for service delivery that meets the needs of complex IT environments. This "smart infrastructure" is the basis of both public and private clouds. This architecture is efficient and agile -- but must also meet a range of new requirements. A smart infrastructure is capable of adapting and adjusting to a wide range of new conditions, backed by centralized management and automation.
Virtualization improves efficiency and provides a high degree of flexibility. Centralized network and service management across physical and virtual environments provides the capability to balance workloads and ensure that resources are available to handle jobs. Automation of management tasks and provisioning provides an efficient infrastructure that does not require constant supervision. Centralized management and control of security also become an imperative because of the need to oversee a more complex environment with potentially greater exposure to risk.
With cloud computing, virtualization is extended using large numbers of processors within a controlled environment that eases deployment and provides for efficient centralized management. Integration of multiple clouds is the next evolutionary step, as services and facilities available from public clouds are linked to internal data center clouds. The hybrid cloud is the final step in that integration.
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