How to Build a Hybrid Cloud Computing Strategy

27.05.2009
Cloud infrastructures are a highly efficient evolution of server virtualization and the scale-out deployment model-but companies should note this evolutionary path isn't a fit for all applications. That being said, cloud computing platforms are more than just shared, multi-tenant infrastructures on the public Internet. Three infrastructure-as-a-service cloud deployment options are available to enterprises today, each with unique characteristics and economics that can help optimize application and service deployment objectives:

1.. These deliver the best economies of scale, but their shared infrastructure model can limit configuration, security, and SLA specificity, making them a less-than-ideal fit for services using sensitive data that is subject to compliancy or safe harbor regulations.

2.. These sit within your data center and behind company-built protections, but they typically have modest economies of scale due to funding limitations and tend to be less automated.

3.. Hosted clouds run at a service provider on resources that are walled off with enterprise-class protections but managed as a pool. These fall between the first two options, providing more custom protections like an internal cloud but with the greater economies of scale of being a service from a cloud provider.

Enterprises should build a strategy that leverages all three options via virtual private cloud technologies, which will result in a hybrid cloud strategy that optimizes business service deployment efficiencies.

Virtual private cloud is a technique for extending your organizational trust boundaries over a series of resources regardless of their deployment. It builds off the basic concept of a virtual private network (VPN), but is a more robust networking concept that lets you define and control addressing, topology, protocols, and encrypted communications for instances deployed to cloud computing platforms.

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