Hybrid Cloud Computing – The Importance of Networks for Flexibility

The utilisation of cloud computing architecture in businesses all over the world is ensuring that organisations involved in the enterprise environment are able to provide flexible infrastructure to members of staff. It is qualities such as this which have propelled cloud computing to the forefront of modern commerce, as the technology offers fantastic opportunities to generate a significant return on investment. Additionally, it is also being increasingly recognized that cloud computing can provide significant security, safety and user stability benefits.

While these are all fantastic reasons to adopt the cloud, one of the more understated benefits is the flexibility that the cloud offers. A recent survey carried out by GigaOM and North Bridge Venture found that cloud computing is catching on very quickly in infrastructure, platform and Software-as-a-Service capacities, allowing for greater customization and flexibility for enterprises.

Big Increase in Hybrid

There has in fact been a more than 40% increase in the usage of combined cloud computing services over the last five years alone. This increase in confidence of hybrid deployments has led to this particular technology becoming the go to cloud service for many businesses. Such hybrid deployments deliver outstanding connected communications, and deliver user functionality which really delivers what every individual member of staff requires.

Cloud computing has been inherently associated with the rise of Big Data, and hardly a day passes by where this concept isn’t discussed in the media. The enterprise landscape is really benefiting from Big Data, and this mass of information is helping to elevate hybrid cloud computing to the next level of performance. Organisations have more and more information to deal with nowadays than at any time in human history, and the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, recently asserted that the human race now produces more data in two days than in its entire history up to 2003!

In such a climate, it is hardly surprising that such a powerful computing platform as offered by hybrid cloud has become successful. Not only does the hybrid cloud enable businesses to deal with the vast data requirements of the modern world, but it also enables a flexible approach to be taken to a company IT setup. By augmenting on-premise or hosted systems with extra cloud-based resources, businesses are considerably better place to deal with the constantly evolving IT requirements of the contemporary global marketplace.

SaaS and IaaS

Hybrid infrastructures are able to include both Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as part of their networks. The advantage of SaaS is that it can be rolled out extremely quickly, which usually removes the need to purchase and/or manage additional hardware applications. While IaaS enables organisations to rapidly and accurately scale capacity to meet changes in requirements.

The latter is particularly useful for dealing with spikes in demand, and with this setup it is no longer necessary to provision either internal or hosted systems to deal with particularly intense times for your network. It is instead possible to simply hire extra capacity as required by your company; an ideally flexible approach which suits many SMEs in particular.

However, although the hybrid cloud provides a very flexible platform, many businesses are paying insufficient attention to the network which connects resources together. If shifting data between in-house and a cloud-based resources is difficult then many of the potential advantages of the hybrid cloud will be neutered completely.

Security is another important consideration with the hybrid cloud. Although a business may have instigated satisfactory protection around its cloud-based infrastructure and on-premise or data centre-hosted systems, potentially the weakest point in its network is the Internet links which connect systems.

Implementing Global IP VPN

The best way to deal with this is to implement private network links between the cloud and non-cloud based elements that you are operating in your infrastructure. This can be achieved via a variety of Global IP VPN services, which provide a level of a guaranteed performance and security which ensures that critical applications within the network can run in a satisfactory environment. This is increasingly important in a world in which businesses often wants to operate both cloud and non-cloud resources, and in which security is of paramount importance.

A hybrid cloud system can be made even more efficient via the deployment of private network links. These enable consumers to ‘dial up’ and ‘dial down’ the capacity of their links as required. This ensures that any required network capacity does not have to be paid for, which is an obvious financial saving, but also offers a great deal of convenience as well.

With closer cloud integration becoming increasingly important, they hybrid cloud also delivers in this department. It is possible with the hybrid cloud to create physical connections between a provider’s network and other data centres. This can further improve the performance of your business network, with the potential now available to create dedicated private network links directly from on-premise infrastructure to external data centres.

When hybrid cloud networks are effectively designed and implemented, they deliver a quality of performance which can improve the commercial reality of businesses of all sizes.