How a hybrid cloud strategy can help improve disaster recovery and business continuity

The use of multiple cloud vendors can help give your business a better ability to recover quickly from disasters and maintain business continuity. But at the same time, running workloads on multiple cloud platforms can add significant complexity to cloud management operations.

These, in a nutshell, are the benefits and challenges from a disaster recovery perspective of adopting an enterprise hybrid cloud strategy. Keep reading for a deeper dive into why hybrid clouds can increase business continuity, as well as how businesses can simplify the complexity of hybrid cloud management through solutions like cloud-managed services.

What is a hybrid cloud strategy?

A hybrid cloud strategy is the use of multiple cloud platforms at the same time. Each cloud hosts different applications and/or data, allowing an organization to pick and choose from multiple options when deciding where to place each workload.

The cloud platforms that form a hybrid cloud can include a mix of public clouds with private clouds that an organization operates in its data center or on-premises.

A hybrid cloud approach is distinct from conventional cloud computing approaches in which organizations rely on just one cloud to host all of their workloads. It's also different from a purely on-premises strategy where all workloads reside on local servers instead of in the cloud.

How a hybrid cloud technology can help improve disaster recovery

Hybrid cloud technology offers many potential benefits, such as the ability to save money (by being able to select the most cost-effective cloud services from among a wide array of platforms) and improve security (by placing highly sensitive workloads in cloud platforms that offer more privacy and control).

However, disaster recovery and business continuity enhancements are arguably the most important benefits of an enterprise hybrid cloud strategy. A hybrid cloud improves disaster recovery and business continuity in at least ways:

• When you spread workloads across clouds, the failure of a single cloud shouldn't disrupt all of your workloads. It will disrupt those that reside in that cloud, leaving workloads hosted elsewhere—such as your private data center—unaffected.
• A hybrid cloud strategy enables streamlined cross-cloud recovery, which means restoring workloads to a different cloud if one cloud fails. This is advantageous in scenarios where companies can't predict how long one cloud may be down and want to restore business operations without waiting for the failed cloud to come back up.

Other approaches to disaster recovery

On balance, it is worth noting that deploying a hybrid cloud is not the only way to ensure disaster recovery and business continuity. Organizations can also adopt strategies such as spreading workloads across different regions or zones within a single cloud. This reduces the impact of a failure because if one of the cloud's regions or data centers fails, not all workloads will be affected.

However, the downside of this approach is that it doesn't protect against failures that affect an entire cloud platform. For example, if you host all of your workloads in different regions of your cloud provider and there is a networking failure that affects that cloud provider as a whole, all of your business operations would likely be disrupted because they all depend on that one cloud provider. In contrast, if you have a hybrid cloud strategy in place that involves running some workloads in a cloud provider but workloads on-premise, some of your workloads would remain available in the event of a cloud-wide outage.

Note, too, that while events like large-scale failures on major public cloud platforms are rare, they can and do happen. Even the best-managed clouds can go down from time to time, taking with them the operations of businesses that depend on the cloud platforms.

The complexity of hybrid cloud management

Although a hybrid cloud strategy offers powerful benefits in disaster recovery, it comes with a drawback: the added complexity of managing multiple clouds at once.

Each cloud platform—including public clouds, as well as private cloud platforms—supports different tools and services, and most of them don't work on other cloud platforms. As a result, managing a hybrid cloud requires the ability to operate a diverse set of tools, work with widely varying configurations and monitor workloads that are distributed across a range of platforms. The clouds themselves provide no easy way to do this.

For example, although cloud providers offer load balancers that distribute network traffic between multiple cloud servers or applications, each cloud's load balancers work only on that cloud.

Cloud managed services: A simpler approach to hybrid cloud

This is where cloud-managed services come in. Cloud-managed services are third-party solutions for cloud management and monitoring, as opposed to solutions built into each cloud platform.

When you administer your cloud with help from cloud-managed service providers that support multiple cloud platforms, you gain a consolidated, centralized solution that allows you to manage all of your clouds and workloads effectively, without having to contend with the underlying complexities of each cloud. The service provider handles those complexities for you. As a result, you can distribute traffic efficiently across all of your clouds using a centralized management solution—to name just one of the many use cases for cloud-managed services.

This is why businesses seeking to benefit from a hybrid cloud strategy should consider multi-cloud orchestration, management and connectivity solutions. By simplifying hybrid and multi-cloud management, these cloud-managed services help organizations reap all of the disaster recovery and business continuity benefits of a hybrid cloud while minimizing the risks and management challenges.

Learn more about how Verizon can help you with your multi-cloud orchestration and network management needs.

The author of this content is a paid contributor for Verizon.