High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Hybrid clouds are a perfect way to remove reliance on a single vendor and therefore a single point of failure. In mission critical applications, companies can instantiate a cloud-based solution while also maintaining an on-premises copy for disaster recovery. Since the architecture that combines compute nodes with object store is similar between on-premises copies and cloud production, both environments can be managed similarly.
Develop Once and Serve Data Anywhere
There’s value to your developers if they can write one set of services without having to worry about the specifics of any given cloud service-provider. You may uncover subtle differences between providers as your real-life analytical workloads hit the servers. Nuances between complicated JOINs, data loading, short/long queries, or machine learning are bound to surface as you evaluate providers. The “noisy neighbors” problem may also be a factor, as some cloud providers share your resources with other clients and make your SLAs unpredictable. The freedom to move a workload seamlessly to another provider, or even to on-premises, allows you to go anywhere your price and performance decisions take you.
Leveraging Previous Hardware Investments
Your company may have already made a major capital investment in hardware, yet the benefits of cloud architectures, with simplified management tools and scalability, might tempt you to abandon those investments in favor of the cloud. In most cases, you can leverage this commodity hardware for an on-premises private cloud by reconfiguring it, thus creating a hybrid environment with all the advantages described here.
When Public Cloud Isn’t Possible
Having a single data infrastructure does not always meet the distinct regulatory and market requirements of each line of business. While cloud technologies may be attractive to your company, there are many reasons you may need to keep at least some data on-premises. For example, regulations may dictate that you keep personally identifiable information (PII) within the country of origin. Configuring an in-country on-premises cloud may be the right solution. On the other hand, sometimes data is so sensitive that only an on-premises solution will do.
