Advantages And Disadvantages Of Hybrid Cloud in Logistics Space

Logistics Transportation Review | Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Ideally, a hybrid cloud provides companies with greater flexibility and alternative workload deployment alternatives without the undesirable trade-offs, such as migrating traditional VM workloads to cloud instances or building native cloud applications tied to vendor-specific services.

Fremont, CA: The construction and maintenance of a hybrid cloud can be challenging. The enterprise does not have direct control over the public cloud, so it must design the private cloud to be compatible with the expected public cloud (or multiple clouds). Compatibility includes suitable computing, storage and network hardware, as well as compatible virtualization and private cloud software (such as OpenStack) to provide the required private cloud services. This requires a lot of expertise from enterprise cloud architects.

Advantages :

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1. Cost control.

Companies must carefully consider the workloads and services running in their private cloud.

The private cloud is deployed on the data center infrastructure controlled and operated by the enterprise, which requires a lot of capital, equipment and talents for deployment and maintenance. Although private clouds can analyze and configure local resources in a cloud-like manner, the private cloud infrastructure is still limited.

Enterprises can reduce costs through the connection between their private and public clouds. This kind of connection helps to alleviate peak demand, and when local demand pressure causes capacity to increase, public cloud resources can be used. Likewise, public clouds are suitable for temporary, experimental or general workloads that companies don't want to source, set up, and manage internally. Use limited private cloud resources for critical data and workloads-or run only the least expensive workloads.

2. Flexibility and scalability.

Agility is the core premise of cloud computing. Private clouds provide some deployment and scalability agility, but the number of available resources in the physical data center is still limited. On the contrary, public cloud users can immediately deploy computing and storage instances and related services without limiting resources. However, moving local workloads to the public cloud usually requires at least some migration preparations.

Consistency is one of the main advantages of hybrid cloud. If the private cloud provides instance types and services similar to the selected public cloud, it will become easier to create, transfer, and scale workloads and resources. This consistency enables enterprises to configure and use private cloud resources in appropriate and cost-effective situations, and then easily utilize resources from public clouds when necessary.

3. Security.

Security is a core focus of many corporate IT teams-data and the workloads that access it are critical business assets. The main security issue in public clouds is that the infrastructure is the proprietary property of the provider. Users cannot view or control this cloud infrastructure. In addition, the cloud provider is responsible for protecting the security of the user's environment in the cloud, but it is responsible when sabotage or other malicious activities rarely occur.

In many cases, the best way to protect data is to keep it internally. The most sensitive data and critical applications are located in data centers owned by private clouds, where the organization’s IT staff can maintain and protect assets. In the case of a combination of public and private environments, companies can obtain a certain amount of common hybrid cloud supervision. Best practices and tools (such as Trend Micro Deep Security, McAfee Hybrid Cloud Security products, and IBM Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure) can help organizations monitor, discover and report security issues across hybrid cloud environments.

4. Compliance.

One of the advantages of public cloud is its global scope and rich nature. Ideally, networking, storage, and computing technologies support most workload operations in data centers located almost anywhere. It does not matter where the workloads in the public cloud provider’s data center cluster are located. However, national boundaries may play a role and limit where companies can store data and operate computing workloads. This complicates the migration of some multinational organizations to pure public clouds.

With hybrid clouds, companies can operate sensitive workloads in their private clouds and move data back and forth between public clouds as the regulatory landscape changes or data and workloads evolve. For example, an organization can collect personally identifiable customer data in a private cloud, clean it, and then send it to a public cloud application for processing or analysis.

5. Uniformity.

Finally, in theory, hybrid cloud supports higher standardization in IT management practices. However, in practice, organizations often strive to create this unity. IT staff do not want to assemble and operate private clouds based on OpenStack or other frameworks, and then develop workflows and piece together the required services. These services hope to be sufficiently consistent with public cloud providers for hybrid work. This is a time-consuming, error-prone and expensive task.

Disadvantages

Architectural complexity

The design and implementation of hybrid cloud is a detailed work, and it usually requires skilled cloud architects to provide services to implement it correctly. Although the underlying hardware may be relatively simple and straightforward, the private cloud software stack may be difficult to grasp. The cloud architect must build resources and services in the private cloud stack and be proficient in the target public cloud so that resources and services are aligned correctly. This raises the bar for change management, software stack patching and upgrades.

Security complexity

Hybrid clouds are difficult to configure and protect. IT staff must not only implement and manage the authentication and security of private cloud (on-premises) workloads and data, but also must implement and manage comprehensive authentication and access control for public cloud resources and services. The security settings in the two areas must be consistent and complementary, and may need to reflect changes in one cloud in the other cloud. Negligence or error exposes important data and workloads to unauthorized access and loss.​​​

Troubleshooting complexity

Problems in hybrid clouds are difficult to isolate and mitigate. Administrators rely on detailed logs and tools to identify problems, and the troubleshooting process for private and public clouds may be different, depending on where the actual failure is determined. Efficient troubleshooting may require the services of experienced administrators and cloud engineers. For example, private clouds provide full visibility into the underlying hardware and software stacks, while public clouds only provide visibility and control backed by the tools of public cloud providers.

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