What is hybrid infrastructure?

A hybrid infrastructure, or hybrid cloud is an IT infrastructure design and environment made up of a mix of on-premises data centers, private clouds and/or public clouds. Operating systems and applications can be deployed on any part of this environment, depending on the business needs and requirements. Hybrid infrastructure uses hybrid IT infrastructure services, or cloud services, to help manage and monitor an enterprise’s entire IT infrastructure. This is important as IT environments and requirements continue to become more complex.

A hybrid cloud architecture can offer important benefits to businesses of all sizes including:

• Control: Instead of trusting a third-party cloud provider to manage every aspect of a company’s IT infrastructure, an IT team can customize and adjust the private end of its hybrid model to fit its needs, maintaining control over critical operations and data.
• Scalability: A hybrid infrastructure allows a company to tap into the flexibility and power of the public cloud to seamlessly increase its operational capacity when computing demands spike, while allowing business-critical data and operations to remain in the private cloud or an on-premise data center. Changing out hardware and software is much faster and easier in a cloud environment compared to traditional network infrastructure, where upgrading can take weeks or even months. 
• Security: With a hybrid cloud model, businesses can leverage the security of on-premises infrastructure and private cloud while taking advantage of the power and services of a public cloud—reducing the potential exposure of critical data. While data stored in a private environment will likely still have to run on a public cloud for analytics and applications, an encryption protocol can be used to minimize security breaches. Organizations can also decide where in the cloud to house their data and workloads based on policy, compliance andsecurity requirements.
• Cost savings: From a cost perspective, hybrid cloud storage is an attractive alternative to a purely private cloud, which can be expensive to update and expand over time. A hybrid infrastructure allows a company to optimize its IT spending while lowering operational expenses with the secure, scalable public cloud for non-mission critical parts of its business.Hybrid cloud vendors often allow companies to pay for public cloud services only when they need them.
• Business continuity: Hybrid environments allow the public cloud to absorb workload surges, so as computing demands increase or suddenly spike, private servers won’t be overloaded. Companies can also back up data by duplicating it to the cloud. This ensures that, in the event of a disaster or computing failure, business operations will not be interrupted. 

While a hybrid cloud architecture may offer myriad business benefits, they can be challenging for an in-house IT team to manage. Cloud infrastructure services, also known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), allow third-party cloud vendors to access and maintain cloud resources. 

Managed cloud service providers offer powerful storage, networking technology and servers to meet the needs of clients. They also provide comprehensivemanagement of hybrid cloud environments, which include on-premises data centers and public and private clouds.

Cloud infrastructure services are extensively automated and scalable, letting clients purchase resources on an as-needed basis. Applications, data, runtime, middleware and operating systems are often managed by a service. The cloud vendor is typically responsible for storage, networking and virtualization.