When it comes to hybrid web hosting, the effectiveness and benefits of it are being researched extensively. This means there are a lot more case studies that point to the benefits of it, but some people still remain skeptical.
Are they just a way for data centers to remain relevant when many things become cloud-based?
Sometimes, people need a wake-up call to realize the benefits of something. And the recent outages that have been seen with cloud-based systems, may be what was needed to bring those skeptics around to a new way of thinking.
Amazon’s Outage
Perhaps one of the biggest examples of one of these kinds of outages was Amazon’s S3 service. In February 2017, this outage meant many sites had gone down while some were performing poorly for a number of hours.
Amazon is one of the biggest names, if not the biggest name, in the public cloud business, which is why many people believe they’re the safest choice.
Their outage created a lot of new lessons that people had to learn from, including the fact the cloud isn’t 100% reliable. However, it’s the benefits of the hybrid cloud approach that most people found interesting.
The Benefits of the Hybrid Cloud Approach
In most cases, a business will adopt a hybrid cloud to provide their on-site systems with more reliability. Disaster recovery systems which offer hybrid options (e.g. http://www.tierpoint.com/disaster-recovery/) present businesses with the option to integrate their on-site infrastructure with the public cloud, which means they’re able to create a much more extensive support system that has backup capabilities and disaster recovery.
However, it also allows them to leverage the public cloud in order to meet spikes in high traffic or to give their system a performance boost.
Nevertheless, the recent issues we’ve witnessed with the public cloud, demonstrate that sometimes, the cloud can be backed up by an on-site system. That’s because, when there’s an issue with the public cloud, organizations that have adopted the hybrid approach are able to backup their systems with their on-site infrastructure. By doing this, it allows them to keep their business running, while businesses who are 100% reliant on the cloud are stuck until the outage has been resolved.
Utilizing a Hybrid Cloud in Your Workplace
The recent outages have taught business leaders a number of crucial things, including:
Assessing which datasets and apps are critical to their business: Many companies look at everything as being “business critical,” which often means they’re overinvesting in their infrastructure services.
Instead, they should be assessing which systems are more crucial than others. For example, an e-commerce store needs to make sure their website is available at all times, but they might be able to cope without their marketing automation system for several hours. Therefore, they need to make sure the datasets and apps that are business crucial are in the cloud and on-site infrastructure.
Understanding their Recovery Point Objective (RPO): This is the assessment of how much data a company can afford to sacrifice, without their business taking a significant hit. This will tie in with their Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which details how long they can afford for their system(s) to be down. This will be different for each business and how critical they deem certain applications, but even those functions that aren’t as business critical as others should have RTO and RPO requirements. By putting these metrics in place, it will help a company create the right strategies, choosing the best deployment options.
Have the right safety nets in place: The first two lessons demonstrate how certain datasets and applications don’t need as many systems or investments as others. However, critical systems should have a safety net to make sure no crucial data is lost during an outage. This is where a hybrid option is beneficial.
Consider durability metrics: A lot of focus is placed on uptime, which means many companies forget about the durability of the server. The server’s reliability relates to uptime, but data loss relates to the server’s durability. For some applications, durability should be just as important as the reliability of the system – e.g. for financial systems. That’s why it’s important to consider both metrics when finding a cloud vendor.
There are a number of arguments as to why a hybrid cloud offers businesses more benefits than they might have expected. A hybrid cloud allows them to make sure they’re putting the most reliable, high-performing system in place, even when the public cloud is causing a storm elsewhere.
