Hybrid cloud the most efficient cloud model

University of Sydney cloud specialists have endorsed the hybrid cloud model as the most cost-effective and efficient way to take advantage of cloud services.

Dr Young Choon Lee, research fellow at the School of Information Technologies’ Centre for Distributed and High Performance Computing, said hybrid or multicloud deployments can combine the main benefits of public and private clouds.

He said hybrid clouds allow businesses to manage mission-critical resources in-house while also utilising external providers and services.

“A business or organisation might use a public cloud service such as Amazon EC2, MS Azure or Google Compute Engine to process and archive burly data, but continue to utilise its in-house storage capacity for operational or day-to-day data.”

Businesses can thus take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness of public cloud environments, without exposing their important data to third-party vulnerabilities.

“The availability of virtually unlimited cloud resource with the elasticity of public clouds in particular is a great opportunity for a business yet determining the best resource provisioning level,” he said.

Companies wanting to pursue a hybrid cloud deployment must balance the trade-off between cost and performance, but can choose multiple trade-off points to best suit their computing requirements.

The university’s chair of high-performance computing and networking, Professor Albert Zomaya, added that cloud models can help businesses replace currently underutilised traditional data centres.

“Data centre usage can be below 20%. Underusage causes a number of issues including the ineffective use of energy and excessive costs,” he said.

“Private cloud capacity can be much reduced by dynamically provisioning public cloud capacity. While sensitive data and time-critical workloads are processed in their private cloud, the rest may be offloaded to public clouds.”

Image courtesy of Garrett Heath under CC