Top 8 benefits of hybrid cloud for business

What is hybrid cloud?

A hybrid cloud is a logical construct that establishes an operational connection between a private cloud and public cloud. Typically, an individual business builds and operates a private cloud intended solely for its own benefit. The cloud might be implemented within the local data center or provided as a third-party service.

A public cloud is typically a major multi-tenant cloud provider, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, as well as countless other SaaS providers. A hybrid cloud exists when an operational relationship is established between a public and private cloud to create a single, ubiquitous, interoperable logical cloud entity.

In more practical terms, a hybrid cloud is an amalgamation of technologies that include an on-premises data center, in-house or third-party private cloud and public cloud services. These technologies are connected through a WAN and integrated through orchestration techniques to move data and workloads seamlessly between private infrastructure and public clouds as computing needs or cost models change.

Ideally, a hybrid cloud provides businesses with competitive advantages, such as greater flexibility, as well as alternatives for workload deployment without unwanted tradeoffs, such as migrating traditional VM workloads to cloud instances or developing cloud-native applications tied to a specific provider's services.

Why hybrid clouds can be challenging to build and maintain

Enterprises have no direct control over the public cloud, so they must architect a private cloud to be compatible with the intended public cloud -- or even multiple clouds. Compatibility includes suitable compute, storage and networking hardware, along with compatible virtualization and private infrastructure software, such as OpenStack, to provide a desired array of private cloud services, network services, enterprise workloads and so on. This setup requires the substantial expertise of enterprise cloud architects and engineers.

As an alternative, some private clouds rely on predesigned infrastructure platforms provided by the public cloud provider. Examples include Azure Stack, Azure Arc, AWS Outposts and Google Anthos. Once deployed in a private cloud setting, these platforms offer a native interconnection to the broader public cloud -- Azure, AWS or Google -- to provide a faster and more convenient path to a hybrid cloud environment.

The most critical consideration is implementing a private cloud software stack compatible with the target public cloud's APIs and services. Without this compatibility, workloads and data can't move seamlessly from private to public clouds and back.

What are the benefits of a hybrid cloud?

Even though there's considerable investment and effort involved, these eight main hybrid cloud benefits make hybrid cloud architecture compelling for many enterprises.

1. Cost control

A business must be prudent about the workloads and services that run in its private infrastructure. A private cloud is typically deployed with an on-premises data center infrastructure that the enterprise controls and operates, requiring a significant investment of capital, equipment and talent to deploy and maintain. Although a private cloud can parse and provision local resources in a cloud-like manner, its infrastructure is still relatively limited compared to the vast global infrastructure of a public cloud provider.

An enterprise can mitigate costs with a connection between its private cloud and a public cloud. When local demand stresses capacity, the business draws upon additional public cloud resources to help smooth those spikes in demand. Similarly, the public cloud suits temporary, experimental or general-purpose workloads the company doesn't want to source, set up and manage in-house, such as disaster recovery. It's best to use finite private cloud resources to host sovereign or critical workloads and data -- or simply run workloads where the costs are lowest.

Public cloud resources and services can also reduce hardware costs within an on-premises data center. For example, a business that uses a server and storage within a public cloud doesn't purchase or maintain that server locally. The public cloud provider shoulders those costs.

The cost benefits of hybrid cloud also provide clarity about where the money goes. A hybrid cloud can make it easy to divide IT consumption into capital and operational costs. Enterprises can use tools and practices, such as FinOps, to monitor cloud usage; obtain detailed reports on utilization by department, manager, workload or other criteria; and quantify the costs of cloud services for closer inspection and oversight.

2. Flexibility and scalability

Flexibility is a core premise of cloud computing. A private cloud provides some provisioning and scaling agility, but the resources available in a physical data center are still limited by the individual organization's budget and capabilities. In contrast, public cloud users can immediately deploy compute and storage instances -- as well as related services -- globally without resource constraints. But expect at least some migration preparation work to move a local workload from private infrastructure to the public cloud or from a public cloud back to the private cloud.

Consistency is one of the main benefits of hybrid cloud. It's easier to create, shift and scale workloads and resources if the private cloud offers instance types and services similar to those available in the chosen public cloud. This consistency enables enterprises to provision and use private cloud resources when it's appropriate and cost-effective, draw upon additional resources from the public cloud when necessary, and then release those additional resources in the cloud when demand or needs shift.

3. Security

Security is a core focus for many enterprise IT teams. Data and the workloads that access it are vital business assets. Traditionally, this requires a strong level of control over the IT infrastructure and its operation.

A main security concern with public cloud is that the infrastructure is the exclusive property of the cloud provider, and its infrastructure is typically multi-tenant, or shared among various users. The cloud user can't see or control the entire cloud infrastructure. Additionally, the cloud provider takes on responsibilities to secure users' environments in the cloud but is rarely responsible when a breach or other malicious activity occurs. Security responsibilities are shared between cloud users and providers -- a relationship typically referred to as the shared responsibility model.

In many cases, the best way to protect data is to keep it on-premises. The most sensitive data and critical workloads stay within the owned data center on a private infrastructure where the organization's IT staff maintains and safeguards the assets. With a combined public and private environment, enterprises gain some common hybrid cloud oversight. 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 advantage of public cloud is its global reach and abundant nature. Ideally, networking, storage and computing technologies support most workload operations from data centers located almost anywhere, even at the network edge. It should not matter where a workload and data reside in the public cloud provider's fleet of data centers. But geopolitical boundaries can come into play, with regulatory limitations on where companies store data -- a concept called data sovereignty -- and operate computing workloads. That complicates the move to purely public cloud for some multinational organizations.

Regulatory compliance presents other challenges, such as protecting and retaining data, which can vary by industry. Regulatory compliance often demands direct control over the storage and processing of sensitive or personally identifiable information. These regulatory demands can often be met with a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

With a hybrid cloud, a business can operate sensitive workloads in its private cloud and move data to and from suitable data centers across the public cloud as the regulatory landscape changes or as data and workloads evolve. In a big data processing project, for example, a company can collect personally identifiable customer data in a private cloud, sanitize it in-house and send it to a public cloud application for processing or analysis.

5. Uniformity

Hybrid clouds, in theory, support greater standardization in IT management practices. But in practice, organizations often struggle to create that uniformity. An IT staff doesn't want to assemble and operate a private infrastructure framework, then develop workflows and cobble together services that are hopefully consistent enough with a public cloud provider to make the hybrid setup work. That's a time-consuming, error-prone and expensive endeavor.

Public cloud providers have become more sensitive to the importance and benefits of hybrid cloud as well as the challenges of integrating private and public environments. Top cloud providers offer various services that focus on hybrid needs:

• AWS Outposts offers capabilities for a hybrid cloud setup based on AWS services.
• Microsoft Azure Stack enables a business to deploy Azure capabilities in on-premises systems.
• Google Anthos doesn't directly extend Google Cloud Platform services on-premises; it uses Kubernetes, containers and plugins to deploy services and workloads in different locations.
• VMware Cloud on AWS is a partnership designed so users can integrate their on-premises VMware environments with Amazon's cloud.

These offerings provide prepackaged hardware and software stacks that can be easily deployed within the users' data center to create a private cloud that's already interoperable with the providers' broader public cloud platform. This saves businesses considerable time, expertise and investment.

As public cloud providers embrace hybrid cloud management, businesses don't need to construct a complete environment top to bottom. Instead, they simply extend the virtualized data center into familiar cloud services. The disadvantage here is vendor lock-in; enterprise users might experience challenges employing multi-cloud hybrid paradigms or face stark limitations when building or configuring their own local cloud infrastructure.

6. Agility

Clouds are designed to make provisioning and scaling much faster than traditional physical or virtualized environments. This "on-demand-for-as-long-as-it's-needed" agility played a huge role in public cloud adoption. Private clouds seek to replicate this kind of agile behavior.

When public and private clouds are merged into a hybrid cloud, that speed and agility take on an entirely new meaning. Businesses can stand up new workloads and data sets on demand and make strategic choices about where to deploy those resources across the hybrid cloud depending on factors such as cost, scale and performance.

A business deploying an application in the private cloud, for example, could scale up the application by deploying a second iteration of the workload in a public cloud data center located within a different geopolitical area that can provide better performance for local users while maintaining data sovereignty requirements for all parties involved. Such goals are almost impossible with traditional data centers and workloads.

7. Continuity and risk management

Business continuity -- the ability to continue functioning during disruption -- is often a primary element of regulatory compliance. Another way that a hybrid cloud enhances business continuity is by supporting application, data and disaster recovery tasks to protect against system failures, security issues and physical disasters, such as fires, earthquakes and acts of war.

A business, for instance, could replicate a critical workload's data from a local application to a public cloud, ensuring that the data remains available or can be restored in the event of data loss at the application. In a more sophisticated example, a business might scale or migrate a busy application from its private cloud to the public cloud to accommodate a spike in user traffic. Such tactics are ideally suited to hybrid cloud environments and can avert workload performance problems and disruptions, further improving UX.

Risk management is another vital consideration. All enterprise applications and data resources carry some risk in terms of access, security, performance, and reliability. Hybrid clouds give businesses the control and agility needed to seamlessly locate applications and data according to changing business and technology needs.

A hybrid cloud lets an enterprise decide where to locate its applications and data, and how to best provision the required resources and services to achieve the most desirable outcome for the business and its application users. For example, private and public clouds can implement strong security services, such as authentication and authorization, to ensure only appropriate employees or partners can access data.

8. Promotes innovation

Recent years have seen a strong emphasis on cloud computing as a driver of business innovation. The underlying idea behind "innovation" is the use of technology to create new opportunities. In this case, hybrid cloud computing can enable an enterprise to use it in ways that enhance business efficiency, manage costs, implement regulatory frameworks, and even drive new revenue.

One example of this innovation is in machine learning (ML) and AI projects. AI platforms are appearing across industries, and it's commonplace for a modern enterprise to deploy several AI platforms -- often while refining and developing others. But AI platforms are particularly challenging in their infrastructure requirements. ML and AI demand considerable computing power, especially when training vast data sets.

Today, an enterprise can deploy an AI platform in a public cloud, using the cloud's enormous infrastructure for training and testing. It can then migrate that trained platform back to the private cloud for production deployment, where it can control and manage the platform locally. In this context, cloud computing is a fundamental enabler of AI innovation.

What are the disadvantages of a hybrid cloud?

Although the potential hybrid cloud benefits can be compelling, numerous hybrid cloud disadvantages need to be considered -- mainly related to complexity issues.

1. Architectural complexity

Designing and implementing a hybrid cloud is a detailed undertaking and often requires the service of a skilled cloud architect. While the underlying servers, storage and networking hardware can be relatively straightforward, the private infrastructure software stack can be complicated to master. Cloud architects must build resources and services within that private tech stack and understand the intended public cloud so resources and services align and interoperate. That raises the bar for change management as well as software stack patches and upgrades.

Ultimately, the key to a successful hybrid cloud is interoperability. A private cloud often must operate in the same ways as its associated public cloud to ensure seamless operation. If a business, for example, chooses to build a private cloud to interoperate with a public cloud, such as AWS, the private cloud must possess some level of compatibility with AWS and its services. As a result, private clouds might be forced to make software and architectural choices that could be difficult or suboptimal for the business. Packaged private clouds, such as AWS Outposts, ease these technical challenges but lock the business further into the provider's architecture.

2. Security complexity

Hybrid clouds can be strikingly difficult to configure and secure. IT staff must implement and manage authentication and security for private -- or local -- workloads and data as well as comprehensive authentication and access control for public -- or global -- cloud resources and services. Security settings for the two realms must remain consistent and complementary, and a change in one cloud might need to be reflected in the other. Oversights, inconsistencies or errors can expose vital data and critical workloads to unauthorized access and loss.

Clear security policies and practices will help by defining security settings and standards. Automation can be an essential tool in deploying and enforcing security policies to avoid oversights and human error. Still, security impacts regulatory compliance and requires comprehensive knowledge of private and public cloud architectures to implement, monitor and test thoroughly.

3. Troubleshooting complexity

Problems in a hybrid cloud environment can be troublesome to isolate and mitigate. Administrators rely on detailed logs and tools to identify problems, and the troubleshooting process can vary between private systems and public clouds depending on where the trouble occurs. Efficient troubleshooting can require the services of highly experienced administrators and cloud engineers. For example, a private cloud offers complete visibility into the private infrastructure and software stack, while a public cloud only offers the visibility and control supported by native providers' and third-party tools. Limited visibility might require some public cloud troubleshooting to involve support staff from the public cloud provider.

Tools matter. Effective troubleshooting across a hybrid cloud demands well-integrated tools that ideally support a single-pane-of-glass approach to enable observability and reporting with actionable alerting, no matter where the issue occurs.

4. Complex cost structures

Cloud cost structures can be notoriously difficult to master. Public cloud costs are stunningly granular, making it difficult to align costs with storage, applications or users. Private cloud costs are much closer to traditional infrastructure, but there are still cost complexities in the integration between public and private clouds, such as the costs of public cloud data exfiltration or the use of API calls. All of these costs can vary with usage.

Cloud cost management is often a team sport using highly experienced cross-disciplinary teams engaged in FinOps practices -- plus a suite of cloud cost-monitoring tools to predict costs and then break cloud billing into meaningful business operations.

Hybrid cloud best practices

Enterprises can adopt several tactics to help mitigate the disadvantages of a hybrid cloud and enhance the success of any hybrid cloud project.

Align goals and start small

Business initiatives fail most often when they are approached with a shortage of time, talent and direction. Organizations new to hybrid cloud technologies should first understand why a hybrid cloud is needed and objectively consider how such an endeavor aligns with business goals. Overlooking this simple benchmark can doom a costly hybrid cloud project from the start.

Next, hybrid clouds can be complex and will require human expertise to implement, refine, scale and manage. There's a huge difference between an IT admin who can deploy a workload in a public cloud versus an experienced engineer who can design and implement a fully realized hybrid cloud. Survey the available talent pool and hire the people who can make that project a success.

Finally, start small. The idea is to limit initial investments and demonstrate the business value of a hybrid cloud relative to simpler, more direct opportunities (the "low-hanging fruit"). This proves the technology, builds skills and expertise, enables refinement and optimization, and increases the likelihood of success for more complex or demanding hybrid cloud mechanics.

Understand security

The team responsible for implementing and managing a hybrid cloud environment should master cloud configuration and security. Invest in training and expertise to secure both the private infrastructure and the intended public cloud. Those configurations must work together seamlessly, but the knowledge base to accomplish that can't be gleaned overnight.

Some organizations spend considerable time and effort experimenting, developing, and refining proof-of-principle deployments before they architect a deployment for production. Companies should also carefully document and manage security to maintain business and regulatory compliance.

Move workloads with care

A hybrid cloud's flexibility doesn't eliminate the need for strategic decisions about workload deployment. Not all workloads are appropriate for each cloud type. Business and regulatory concerns might require that some critical workloads remain in a local data center, while other workloads may be suitable or ideal for public cloud deployment.

Organizations must understand where that line is for their own business and industry and make deployment decisions accordingly. Cloud data exfiltration can also pose unexpectedly high costs, so once data is in a public cloud, moving it to a private cloud can be a budget-busting affair.

Similarly, not all workloads are suited for all cloud environments, and the costs of moving data sets from the public cloud can quickly become prohibitive. Legacy workloads might still require more traditional local data center infrastructure and management. IT staff must allow for private cloud and traditional data center infrastructure to operate simultaneously.

Use automation and orchestration

Clouds are not intended to be manually controlled entities. Private infrastructure, public clouds and the hybrid clouds created from them depend on substantial automation to implement services and resources as uniform, consistent processes. Automation, when paired with orchestration, performs tasks with little -- if any -- human intervention.

For example, clouds are frequently based on container technologies and platforms, such as Docker and Kubernetes. AI is increasingly responsible for these automation and orchestration tasks, and it should be approached with careful attention to operational efficiency and cost control.

Implement monitoring and observability

The adage "You can't manage what you can't see" is particularly true for hybrid clouds. Organizations depend on a variety of tools within the private cloud and tools supporting the desired public cloud provider to achieve observability across the entire hybrid cloud environment.

Comprehensive monitoring is crucial to ensure workload availability, health and reliability as well as to gauge performance, no matter where those assets are deployed. Monitoring and observability provide a sound justification for scaling -- adjusting the costly resources allocated to the workload -- and offer objective measures for troubleshooting when problems arise.

Use encryption

Data is an organization's most valuable asset. Encrypting that data at rest and in flight can help mitigate loss or theft when intruders manage to slip past a security vulnerability. Comprehensive encryption should be standard practice within private cloud and public cloud storage.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in 2023 and was updated in 2026 to include more information on hybrid cloud.

Stephen J. Bigelow, senior technology editor at TechTarget, has more than 30 years of technical writing experience in the PC and technology industry.