5 Real Life Examples of Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud architecture is a combination of private and public cloud architectures with a smooth integration.

The companies cannot solely rely on either private cloud network (due to lack of versatility) or public cloud network (companies are hesitant to put their sensitive intellectual processes on a public cloud).

Hence the migration to the hybrid cloud seems logical as it offers the best of both worlds.

We will be looking at some of the most interesting hybrid cloud real-life examples in this blog.

Availability, compliance with financial standards, and security are essential for every financial services company.

And for a company which was growing at 50% each year and capacity touching 20 times the base capacity, it was getting difficult to survive with on-premise IT infrastructure alone.

But such necessities always bring out innovative approaches.

To keep their standards intact, BlackLine found a way of deploying its private cloud infrastructure at a Verizon colocation facility. This approach gave them a data center that is built from security and compliance purposes.

BlackLine’s strategy of using the Verizon facility helped them to retain total control over their intellectual property and sensitive data while receiving the required network speed and reliability.

Monash University wanted to eliminate tape and in-house tape storage and embrace to cloud. They were using the data domain as a backup target and it was getting more expensive and its capacity was limited.

Along with it, there was no backup cloud option to store it.

University’s Director of data-backup contacted the SteelStore cloud storage appliance for solving their problems. A proof-of-concept proved that the experiment was successful. 

The on-site appliance had a built-in disk that could store the most recent backups to allow the local backups.

This data was also replicated at AWS, a public cloud, which offers cheap and deep storage for long term purpose.

SteelStorage used encryption, compression, and de-duplication to ensure the efficient use of backup SteelStorage capacity and network bandwidth. As the encryption keys were managed on-premises, the data in the cloud was secured.

Local governments don’t have large budgets which makes it really difficult to manage the growing expectations of its citizens.

A small county called Northumberland faced a similar scenario with its current infrastructure aging and data center nearing its capacity.

So instead of continuing to invest in the existing data-center, they opted to invest in the hybrid cloud architecture.

But since the data is subjected to strict privacy laws and personally identifiable information, it was essential to ensure that the Northumberland municipality has the total control over the data.

They opted for NPS which helped to retain control over the data and at the same time it helped them to deliver better customer service to its customers. This helped the municipality to save about $250,000 taxpayers’ money.

A renowned Japanese firm Fujitsu identified a hybrid cloud as a way to increase its service base and improve revenue.

The firm offers a better cloud service with more flexibility and control with the help of NetApp Private Storage for Microsoft Azure.

This new service was being implemented to ensure support for the development work of the firm's in-house system integration engineering teams.

It was planned that they will later provide SAP development, disaster recovery services, and testing for enterprise and midmarket customers in Finserv, Pharma, and Retail sectors.

NetApp’s assistance with Ducati’s data center modernization led to new opportunities outside of the engineering and design departments that Ducati might never have imagined otherwise.

This assistance with NetApp ensured a data center modernization that opened new doors outside of design and engineering departments which they hadn't imagined.

This consolidation with Ducati made all of the data assets available in a single, unified system that offered minimal footprint, optimal productivity, and improved access to all of its enterprise-grade capabilities to achieve Ducati's needs.

Ducati has worked on four different hybrid cloud projects which include implementation of disaster recovery and data protection, computing cluster renewal, research for new IT infrastructure model, and data center consolidation.

In the end, they have achieved great results in three key objectives namely data awareness, speed, and minimal footprint.  The footprint was reduced by 20 times, while the data center was being used 7 times less than earlier.

Compression, de-duplication, and compaction helped them to achieve data optimization of at least 10:1 overall and as high as 27:1 in some cases.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is unquestionably the most dominant force in the cloud world.

Although it is widely known for its public cloud platform services, it offers Hybrid cloud infrastructure with on-premise installation services also. Its products range from burst capacity to disaster recovery.

Microsoft’s hybrid cloud platform is well known due to its legacy of on-premises solutions. Microsoft offers Azure Stack offers to duplicate the entire Azure environment on a private cloud.

Google initially started with a public cloud platform only but now they offer hybrid cloud services also with some of the well-known private cloud companies like Cisco.

Their range of products varies from disaster recovery platform to data compression and high-speed platforms.

Cisco is a private cloud company that offers you a hybrid cloud through a partner network.

Cisco’s biggest partner is Google for the hybrid cloud collaborations.

NetApp is also a private cloud provider platform that offers hybrid cloud services through collaborations with some of the big-name cloud platforms. Their major partner is Amazon AWS for these hybrid cloud collaborations.

Also Read:

6 Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges & How to overcome them
Cloud Migration Process Explained in Easy Steps
14 Best Cloud Infrastructure Automation Tools