Hybrid Cloud Architecture: Benefits and Challenges

More organizations are embracing hybrid cloud architecture, particularly those that rely on private clouds for legacy infrastructure and mission-critical apps.

A hybrid cloud architecture combines public and private clouds via a wide area network or broadband connection. Hybrid cloud architecture enables the sharing of applications and data in a single managed IT infrastructure. The model has many benefits as well as a few challenges to keep in mind if you are thinking of transitioning.

Hybrid Cloud Architecture Benefits

Flexibility

The main benefit of hybrid cloud architecture is its flexibility. On-premises IT infrastructure requires time and money. Additionally, adding capacity involves advanced planning.

Whenever you need IT resources on short notice, the cloud is ready and able to provide them. Cloud bursting refers to the use of public clouds when demand exceeds private cloud resources. Some businesses have seasonal spikes that can put an extra strain on private clouds, which the public cloud can then handle.

Demand can also change depending on geographic location and events. With the public cloud, your organization can deal with these and other unanticipated IT loads without having to invest in expensive and inefficient on-premises IT resources.

Disaster Recovery

By using a hybrid cloud, you can take advantage of the economies of cloud-based backup without maintaining a separate disaster recovery site. Should your primary data center or private cloud crash, you can “spin up” snapshots stored in the public cloud and resume your apps with minimal problems.

Cost Savings

A hybrid cloud can provide cost-effective IT resources without incurring capital expenses or labor costs. Finding the right configuration, service provider, and location can cut costs by matching on-demand resources with tasks that fit them best. When you need to scale, redeploy, or reduce services, you can save money through increased efficiency and by avoiding unnecessary expenses.

Seamless Migration

With hybrid cloud architecture, you can move front-end and stateless applications to the cloud first. Later, you can move other applications either in virtual machines or containers. You can also still maintain legacy applications that you cannot transfer to the cloud on-premises for regulatory compliance, governance, or other reasons.

Synopsys Teams with IBM on Hybrid Cloud

Synopsys has teamed with IBM to implement hybrid cloud architecture into chip design. With IBM, we have run our Proteus tool in hybrid cloud mode and have seen impressive results.

The Proteus tool helps chip design companies to perform optical proximity correction (OPC). OPC is a next-generation approach to prove the manufacturability of extremely complex chips. Since Proteus runs on a distributed computing system, it is ideal for hybrid cloud environments.