Hybrid computing is the way forward

Public and private clouds are buzzwords that every IT organizations could not stop hearing about in the past one year. Now it has transformed itself from being a mere buzzword to the trend that every organization wants to cash in on. The other flavour is hybrid computing that is gaining momentum these days in the organizations.

Public cloud describes computing as a consumption and delivery based model, with dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources serviced via internet. The potential for cheap and commoditized computing resources in the public cloud far outweighs the benefits that in house installations in terms of less operating costs, peak load engineering and so on.

Private cloud is termed as cloud in the internal network that tries to emulate the cloud computing. The private clouds in existence today are virtualized environments that claim to offer data security, governance and address reliability concerns. It has its own pitfalls when we try to fit applications of different nature and thus bringing the cost of ownership closer to what traditional deployment models have.

Select Public cloud when

• Infrastructure requirements are high for your application. If your organization is in SME range, this would be ideal.
• Agility in terms of scaling to meet your application user base/load growth
• Reuse the peak load optimizations and techniques, and you don’t have to re-engineer them every time.
• No maintenance and other administrative tasks involved.

Select Private cloud when

• Data security is prime concern
• Corporate governance and proprietary data. For e.g financial institutions, health care services.
• Already have an infrastructure that can be utilized for majority of applications and the investment in resources is high.
• Applications are too complex that require more control and migrating them to the cloud would lead to disruption in service.
• Increased need for ownership and accountability within organization on the processes.

Though both models have their own pros and cons, increasingly organizations find themselves entangled in the need for having both to serve their own requirements. Moving to Public cloud mode for the applications that need to be accessed and scaled, but remain integrated with the sensitive back end system remains a worry for many of the organizations. That’s where the CIOs prefer to go completely with private cloud not realizing the pit falls and compromises it brings in.

This is where the hybrid computing finds itself in a niche position with the applications that require dynamic scaling and faster responses to client demands and adaptability; it can be serviced via public clouds while the integration can still be done with the sensitive and proprietary data hidden behind the corporate firewalls.

As more and more practical scenarios are realized using hybrid computing in the recent days, it could become a force to reckon for businesses and individual users. With the best of both worlds, hybrid computing, no doubt, is the latest trend in IT services and solutions.