Hybrid cloud solutions offer key benefits to enterprises – combining the best services of multiple providers allows each individual aspect of your business to run at optimal efficiency. However, keeping track of decentralized data and integrating existing private cloud systems with a hybrid cloud provider can be challenging.

The key to ensuring the best possible result from hybrid cloud integration is by establishing a uniform policy that serves as a foundation for communication among disparate business units that may be running on separate infrastructure platforms.

There are a few situations that hybrid clouds are uniquely suited to address. For instance, if your company wishes to use a Software-as-a-Service application but is concerned about security, the SaaS vendor can create a private cloud, inside their firewall, specifically for your company. If the company provides you with a virtual private network to access the software, you're essentially using a small-scale hybrid cloud.

The key element there is that there is a private cloud working alongside a public cloud – this is the defining characteristic of hybrid clouds. Enterprises get a flexible, cost-effective mix of public and private cloud services.

Elements of the Combined Private/Public Cloud

The purpose of the hybrid cloud is giving enterprises the ability to move workloads from the private cloud to the public cloud when needed. This may be desirable for any number of reasons – outage or peak demand for computing resources in the private cloud, for instance.

When this happens, the hybrid cloud infrastructure allows for additional computing resources to be called upon on an as-needed basis, but achieving that level of integration requires considering a number of factors: