In “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing,” Peter Mell and Timothy Grace point out that there are four types of clouds: Private, public, community, and a hybrid mix of at least two of these. If you are thinking “What is a community cloud?” then I encourage you to go back and read the NIST paper. It’s really short and succinct, and your personal cloud vocabulary will be better for it. The vast majority of business will end up using their own private clouds and interfacing with various public cloud offerings from their partners. Availability seems to fit just perfectly as a hybrid cloud opportunity.
Private cloud (on-premises) infrastructures like physical and virtual machines that were traditionally protected with backups kept in on-site backup repositories, or on tape-based archival systems that were transported to off-site tape storage facilities, have begun to be replaced by hybrid cloud Availability solutions that offer benefits such as reduced costs, better accessibility, and reduced RPO/RTO times. When you look at those benefits, it’s easy to see why businesses large and small are moving to hybrid cloud solutions to improve Availability.
There are three key scenarios where I think hybrid cloud solutions really seem to be a benefit:
1. Extending the data center to the cloud
Using public cloud storage with its low cost, scalability, accessibility and security is a nice fit for a business looking to replace the cost and complexity of an on-premises data center. Veeam Availability Suite can be used with appliances such as Microsoft StorSimple, NetApp AltaVault, or virtual appliances to connect to public cloud storage in a hybrid solution that extends Availability to the public cloud and can cut costs dramatically over legacy tape infrastructures.
2. Remote Office/Branch Office operations
In a Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) environment, a business could use a managed service provider and/or manage their own connections via Veeam Cloud Connect to enable hybrid cloud Availability on a site-by-site basis. This software-based Availability design makes it easy to protect and archive data while it also lets the business recover individual files or even whole VMs from the public cloud or managed services storage in a fast and easy manner.
3. Backup and restore anything to the cloud
The business world revolves around data. That data could be raw, part of a database, application or mission critical service. It could be produced on client desktops, laptops, tablets, cell phones or servers. It might be resident in a virtual environment or in a physical one. The key is that the business needs to be able to backup and restore this data both to and from the cloud. The backup and recovery needs to work in both directions. Tools such as Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 enable the backup of cloud-based data to an on-premises data repository and then enable recovery back to Office 365 or to an on-premises Exchange Server. This ability to backup and recover data across both segments in a hybrid cloud truly extends Availability.
If you are interested in learning more about improving Availability with hybrid cloud solutions from Veeam, read our complete white paper, “Three Key Scenarios for Leveraging Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures to Improve Availability.”
Here at Veeam we never recommend one storage solution or cloud solution over another to our customers, however, we do build integration features into our products for our customer who make specific choices. If you are interested in learning more about using Veeam Availability Suite in conjunction with Microsoft Azure, join us for the great webinar, Hybrid Cloud Solutions from Veeam and Microsoft Azure on Feb. 15, 2017.