Source: Alibaba Cloud
This implementation is transparent and appears homogenous to users at all access levels. The interface is usually managed using proprietary or commercially available software. The hardware infrastructure consists of cloud storage appliances that reside in the organization’s datacenter and serve as a gateway between the on-premises and public clouds.
1. Cost Savings
Easily the biggest benefit for enterprises, hybrid cloud storage is a great improvement over the expensive storage arrays needed to maintain data and workflows in a private cloud. A hierarchical storage management policy ensures data is moved to the cheap, pay-as-you-go public cloud as it ages, loses value or relevance, and is accessed with decreasing frequency.
Additionally, both the direct cost and speed of backups and recovery are made simpler with tiered storage, offering more opportunities to save on hardware costs.
2. No-limit Scalability
In the enterprise, there is potentially no limit to the workflow or data operations that can be scaled with a hybrid cloud deployment. It leverages the computing capabilities of the organization’s datacenter for business-critical data, and adds the flexibility and space of the public cloud for file storage and demand spikes.
How? Storage is not just limited to data blocks. There needs to be a matching increase in performance capabilities. Enterprise consumers are already pushing exabyte capacities. While public clouds can scale for this, workflows and applications now need hundreds of gigabytes and millions of IOPS (input/output operations per second) to keep operations going.
Hybrid cloud implementations provide for this infrastructure agility with rapid deployment, commissioning and de-commissioning of storage and file system elements as per the requirements of each application.
3. Need for Speed
Performance and speed go hand in hand. Mission-critical workloads that have low tolerance limits on data latency are not suitable for the public cloud, but those can be managed by the private, on-premises infrastructure that enterprises already have in place, or can upgrade to easily.
Hybrid cloud deployments are API-driven and allow for speed and productivity improvements in development. Enterprises usually opt for a lift-and-shift model of deployment or migration, using which they can seamlessly continue their operations, reduce the time to solution significantly, and speed up innovation by rapidly developing and deploying new apps.
4. Ideal Infrastructure and Ecosystem for Enterprise Applications
That brings us to the primary applications of hybrid cloud storage, along with new services and new apps that are born in the cloud itself, and generate a lot of data from Day 1. However, these applications don’t exist in a vacuum – they need a whole ecosystem of processes, services, and infrastructure to support them.