By Rob Wilson, CTO, NeoSystems
Cloud Computing generally and the use of Hybrid Cloud Computing have been gaining momentum in recent years. It is clear they are here to stay and for good reason. The Hybrid arrangement is being used as a bridge to the resources in the Public Cloud, or as a way to acquiring a sufficient inventory of processing power to meet increasing demands to store and process data. As the world’s IT ecosystem grows, and global economic, health, and social situations change, especially as they have over the past year, cloud computing has taken center stage with a broader, more robust hybrid cloud.
For this discussion let’s define a hybrid cloud as a mix between the use of public and private clouds. A cloud service provider offers a public cloud to a general market, where applications, compute resources and storage are available via the Internet. Servers, data centers, maintenance, and physical security are turnkey with the public cloud provider’s service arrangement. Subscribing to a public cloud allows companies to pay for what they use, without the burden of maintaining the infrastructure.
A private cloud, however, carries a purpose-built architecture dedicated to a single organization or single purpose, which may provide necessary advantages. The private enterprise controls and maintains all facets of this cloud and its data for its users. They impose their own security guidelines and have full control and accountability for data and applications necessary.
A hybrid cloud model is allocation of both public and private clouds and orchestrates usage between them. If a workload is sensitive, subject to specialized compliance or regulations, there may be a desire to run such applications on its private cloud. The onus of cybersecurity, scalability, maintenance, and updating, falls on the private enterprise, but is fully within the control of the private enterprise.
Public cloud applications and workloads offer advantages that are more suitable for other applications; they may be used for high-volume processing and accommodate a need for scalability if required due to cyclical demands and workloads, with additional capacity. The use of the public cloud does not relieve the need for good cybersecurity hygiene. In fact, securing a public cloud can often be more complex and require a unique level of expertise to use the plethora of tools provided by and responsibilities passed down from the public cloud service provider.
While a hybrid cloud model incorporates both public and private clouds, the allocation between both is a balancing act with benefits as well as burdens in its orchestration. The flexibility of the hybrid cloud, however, has proved to be valuable lately in the wake of a global pandemic. But even before the pandemic, the flexibility of a hybrid model has been a boon to IT enterprises seeking to meet its data processing needs against the inevitability of change.
Growing Interest in Multi-Cloud Strategies
According to Flexerra’s “2020 State of the Cloud” report firms are using 2.2 public and 2.2 private clouds on average: they’re considering adding 1.2 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds, per organization, on average. Their research found that 93 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy, while 87 percent have a hybrid cloud strategy. They also found survey respondents plan to boost cloud spending by nearly 50 percent in 2021. Optimizing cloud usage, according to their research, was a top IT priority for those surveyed, for the fourth year in a row.
Interest in cloud optimization and hybrid cloud broadening has only grown during the pandemic. Deloitte, in their sponsored piece within the Wall Street Journal, amplified the necessity of today’s cloud to accommodate the added stress on IT infrastructure with a surge in remote workers during our pandemic.
“As IT departments scrambled to virtualize the global workforce earlier this year, stress on existing infrastructure forced many organizations to lift and shift to the cloud quickly, with speed prioritized over optimization,” their article “Multi-cloud Infrastructure for the Future of Work,” describes, “At the same time, infrastructure risks such as limited access to on-premise systems and the vulnerability of tightly interlocked business and technology architectures took on new urgency.”
The Pandemic Factor
In parallel to a surge in remote working, the pandemic also catalyzed an uptick in e-commerce. For example, online seller Etsy migrated from 2,000 on-premises servers, to a public cloud service provider, in order to stay apace of the growing online demand for the products it sells, and the necessary data processed doubled during the pandemic.
Retailer Wayfair also increased its use of cloud computing in 2020, widening its hybrid-cloud landscape. Originally, they did this before the pandemic to accommodate an expected shopping spree in its annual spring promotional sale. Then the pandemic hit, e-commerce became a popular place to shop, and Wayfair was already in an ideal position to meet the surge in demand.
Security: A Key Consideration
Cloud computing always warrants consideration of IT security concerns. In the wake of dire cybersecurity breaches, the security intrinsic to hybrid clouds remains a key concern. The firm Nutanix surveyed 2,650 IT leaders in 24 different countries. They found that over half responded that security among clouds – public or private – would have the biggest influence on their cloud deployment plans going forward. Data security and compliance were the most important variable in determining where an enterprise runs a given workload.
In their findings, IT professionals deem the hybrid cloud the most secure of all the IT operating models. About one-third of those surveyed responded that the hybrid model was most secure. A mere one-fifth or respondents felt the private cloud was more secure, and a much smaller fraction of respondents were in favor of no cloud at all and depending on-premise servers to process data. Personally, I think cyber security is hard in any scenario. Leveraging public and private for their strengths with a security model designed specifically for the hybrid arrangement will be key to a secure and successful integrated solution.
In summary, the hybrid cloud is here to stay and is growing. At the end of 2020, researcher IDC prognosticated the near-term for cloud computing: “Cloud in all its permutations – hardware/software/services/as a service as well as public/private/hybrid/multi/edge – will play ever greater, and even dominant, roles across the IT industry for the foreseeable future,” said Richard L. Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC. “By the end of 2021, based on lessons learned in the pandemic, most enterprises will put a mechanism in place to accelerate their shift to cloud-centric digital infrastructure and application services twice as fast as before the pandemic.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rob Wilson is co-founder and Chief Technical Officer for NeoSystems. Rob’s vision has established the strategic outsourcer and managed services provider as a firm built on superior technological capabilities focused on the Government Contracting market. Under his leadership, NeoSystems Private Cloud, NeoSystems.Cloud, has been audited for SSAE-18 SOC 1 & SOC 2, FedRAMP Ready FISMA Moderate and CMMC ML3 (coming soon). Before co-founding NeoSystems, Rob worked to run and implement technology solutions at AOL, Netscape and AT&T to offer superior service to clients. Rob holds a Bachelor’s in Computer Science degree from the University of Central Florida.
