The demand for Hybrid Clouds is growing, and growing fast. Many companies are starting to recognise that a hybrid solution – a combination of both on-premise and public cloud services – is an ideal strategy for their organisation, bringing the benefits of both worlds to their workforce.
The Hybrid Cloud model is really the brainchild of the developing cloud & IT industry over the past 3-5 years; whilst many have been getting their head around “do we stay on premise, do we do everything in a private cloud, or do we move everything into the public domain”, the likes of industry analysts such as Gartner and forward thinking IT teams, recognised the strengths and weaknesses in both private and public models, and saw that the combination of the two in the form of a hybrid cloud model could enable a highly agile, flexible and secure platform to be created, in a way that suited an organisations specific business needs, whilst making use of their current and past investments.
Although some organisations will use a hybrid model where some applications are completely on-premise and other applications are completely public, the Hybrid Cloud model also paves way for “Cloud Bursting” – allowing an organisation to expand capacity into the public cloud as and when needed whilst making efficient use of the on-premise infrastructure or private cloud technology in place. The Cloud Bursting model effectively means temporarily bursting into the public cloud when the private threshold or capacity is met.
Collaboration & Cloud Bursting
With the growing adoption of Collaboration and Conferencing within the workplace, it has become increasingly difficult for IT teams to calculate required capacities, changing and growing demand, or sudden requirement spikes for one off or irregular large events. Therefore, the option to burst into the public cloud when unplanned usage requires it has become a very desirable option for many.
One of the leading innovators in the Collaboration industry, Pexip, has recognised this real need for organisations to have the capability to “burst into the cloud”, for situations where the day-to-day conferencing platform capacity does not meet the needs for a specific occasion or conference. Their Infinity Platform has been expanded to include a dynamic hybrid cloud feature that supports the burst from an on-premise deployment into a public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, such as Amazon Web Services, so that organisations can gain the familiarity and stability of their on-premise deployment, whilst accessing the flexibility of the cloud, as and when required.
Infinity API displaying real-time on-premise usage & statistics of cloud bursting within conference
During the recent ISE (Integrated Systems Europe) event in Amsterdam, Pexip’s lead software engineer, Ian Mortimer, took the opportunity to discuss Pexip’s Dynamic Hybrid Cloud feature to show how the platform can burst to the cloud, and scale back to the private platform, seamlessly, as and when capacity changes. See the demonstration video here
This new feature of the Pexip Infinity Platform means that customers don’t have to make a choice between on-premise or public solutions – they can get the best of both worlds. This flexibility enables organisations to take advantage of the right deployment model for them, for that specific requirement, at that specific time. This hybrid model is also very cost efficient in that unused cloud instances can be turned off when they are no longer needed, saving money and resources, whilst ensuring that users productivity is not stifled by capacity of conferences and collaboration sessions being reached.
