As you experience more pressure to shift towards the cloud, you’ll find yourself faced with a critical decision: “Which cloud model is best for my needs?”
I know that some may be quick to jump into a single public cloud provider because it is by far the most accessible, and in some instances that will be perfectly fine. With many single public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, for example, you can also be up and running within minutes. They provide tools to streamline onboarding and there’s a heap of online support options ready and waiting for you.
Although these sound like clear advantages for moving your entire application to a single public cloud provider, there are a variety of reasons why a multi-hybrid cloud model may be the better option, depending on your use case.
To be clear, we’ll define a multi-hybrid cloud as a mixed computing model featuring components located on-premises, in the private cloud and in more than one public cloud instance from numerous providers. This article will take you through some of the benefits of a multi-hybrid cloud model and why it can be a more effective approach than relying solely on a single public cloud provider.
Build exactly what you need
Firstly, a multi-hybrid cloud model offers you greater flexibility and customisation. With a hybrid approach, you can choose the mix of cloud services and infrastructure that is the best match for your unique needs. You can choose to keep certain applications and data on-premises or in a private cloud while leveraging the scalability and agility of a public cloud provider for other workloads. With a multi-cloud approach, you can even segment workloads to match with the public cloud provider most suited to them. This allows you to create a customised and optimised cloud environment that aligns with your business objectives.
A hybrid cloud model is also a very popular way for businesses to migrate to the cloud, with one foot still in the data centre while exploring the advantages of the cloud with the other.
Redundancy and resilience
A multi-hybrid cloud model also provides increased resilience and redundancy. By distributing workloads across multiple public cloud providers and environments, you can ensure that they are not solely reliant on any one provider. This mitigates the risk of downtime, data loss and other disruptions that can negatively affect business operations. What if there’s an outage? With a hybrid model, workloads can be seamlessly shifted to another provider or environment, minimising the impact on end users.
You can probably remind yourself of all the major service outages happening over the last while. Can you afford to be affected by an outage like that?
Full control over security and privacy
Another key benefit of a multi-hybrid cloud model is improved security and compliance. With a hybrid approach, you can maintain greater control over your sensitive data and applications by keeping them on-premises or in a private cloud. Along with that, you can also ensure that data is properly protected and managed according to industry regulations like the Protection of Personal Information Act and any relevant best practices.
At the same time, you can take advantage of the security and compliance capabilities offered by public cloud providers, like built-in encryption and compliance certifications. This goes a long way to taking care of the basics and it means that you don’t have to add these to your own responsibilities.
Optimised cloud costs
Something to consider is that a hybrid cloud model can help you optimise your cloud spending. You are able to strategically allocate workloads to the most cost-effective cloud environments or to the environment most suited to the nature of the workload. You can reduce your overall cloud spend while still maintaining the scalability and agility that you need to support business growth. This can be especially beneficial in cases where your application experiences fluctuating workloads or unpredictable demand because you can leverage the elasticity of the public cloud while keeping costs under control. Cloud estates that aren’t optimised can also result in a billing nightmare, regardless of which model you choose to go with.
This article doesn’t even take into account what you can achieve with multi- and/or poly-cloud models, which extends your capabilities even further.
In conclusion, although a single public cloud provider may seem like the simplest and most straightforward option, a hybrid cloud model offers big benefits that can make it the better choice for many scenarios. By leveraging the flexibility, resilience, security and cost savings of a hybrid approach, you’re able to create a cloud environment that meets your unique needs and enables you to drive business success.
Learn more about LSD at lsdopen.io.
- The author, Deon Stroebel, is LSD’s chief commercial officer and is responsible for shaping LSD’s solution sets and creating value for customers
- Read more articles by LSD on TechCentral
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