Hybrid Clouds and Bandwidth

Hybrid clouds and bandwidth

Steven Brown

A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment in which an organization provides and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally. The hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities. This type of hybrid cloud is also referred to as hybrid IT.

Hybrid IT is an approach to enterprise computing which allows an enterprise to maintain a centralized approach to IT governance, while experimenting with cloud computing. Increasing numbers of organizations are looking to leverage on the scale and flexibility of public clouds, but are concerned about losing control of systems and data outside of their four walls. The growing importance of hybrid cloud environments is transforming the entire computing industry as well as the way businesses are able to leverage technology to innovate. Economics and speed are the two greatest issues driving this market change.

Hybrid cloud provides a promising alternative to the conventional cloud-based large-scale content distribution. It addresses the potential limitations of the conventional approaches while inheriting their advantages. Hybrid cloud architecture, companies and individuals are able to obtain degrees of fault tolerance combined with locally immediate usability without dependency on internet connectivity. Hybrid cloud architecture requires both on-premises resources and off-site server-based cloud infrastructure.

The inaugural IDC Government Insights report, released earlier this year, paints a revealing picture of how the U.S. Federal Government is spending and planning to spend information technology (IT) dollars on cloud solutions.

Federal cloud services spending will reach $1.7 billion in FY2014, and, boosted in part by U.S. Federal CIO Cloud Council efforts the past few...