Hybrid cloud is becoming a familiar concept for IT pros and business leaders, and many are looking to this model as a way to provision compute and storage resources on demand without extensive upfront costs. This ebook looks at the nuts and bolts of the hybrid cloud model and lists resources for organizations that are hoping to take advantage of it.

From the ebook:

Hybrid cloud is the combination of compute or storage products from public cloud services (such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure) with a private cloud infrastructure—servers that are generally on premises running a cloud software stack. The public and private environments basically operate independent of each other and communicate over an encrypted connection, either through the public internet or through a private dedicated link.

The way in which public cloud services and private cloud operations are used depends on organizational needs and priorities. The degree to which public cloud services are used can be as minimal as an offsite backup or as extensive as being the primary component of data storage and processing. Finding an appropriate balance between public and private requires evaluating your organization’s IT budget, the strength of internet infrastructure in the areas where your organization operates, the need for regulatory compliance, and allowances for legacy applications that can’t be easily migrated to the cloud and cloud-based applications that can’t be run on premises.

There is a discrete difference between hybrid cloud and multicloud. Hybrid cloud requires usage of both public and private cloud components, whereas multicloud is the practice of using cloud services from multiple heterogeneous public cloud services, optionally including private cloud and hybrid clouds with more than one public cloud component.

Deployments explicitly labeled hybrid cloud have declined in recent years as other deployment concepts, such as hyperconverged infrastructure, have risen in popularity.