Building Your Hybrid Cloud Strategy with AWS

Public sector organizations continue to push forward and attempt to do more with less. They must find creative ways to innovate and bring new ideas to their organizations, while also facing challenges such as increasing cyber threats and maintaining mission-critical legacy systems. One way public sector customers bring innovation into their organization is with a hybrid cloud strategy.

Organizations across the globe are using a hybrid cloud model (the use of both on-premises and public cloud resources) to reduce or eliminate operational challenges that are difficult to address with traditional IT infrastructure. Hybrid cloud gives organizations the flexibility to achieve a range of goals, including increased efficiency and reliability, high availability, security, and cost efficiency.

Hybrid Cloud Benefits

Let’s look at three benefits of establishing or extending a hybrid cloud deployment:

1. Accelerate Innovation: In a cloud environment, prototyping and testing can be done without capital expenditures or long procurement cycles, and upon validation, complete services can be deployed quickly. Since organizations are no longer limited by their IT footprint, they can spend more time on higher value projects.
2. Business Continuity: Hybrid cloud architectures are often considered a key component of a business continuity solution, where critical data is replicated to the cloud in a different location than the primary systems. Data is available in the event of a downtime event, accelerating time to operation.
3. Scalability and Speed of Response: No matter how well you plan to meet today’s needs, you won’t know how your requirements might change next month or next year. A hybrid cloud environment provides the opportunity to scale out to a cloud environment for specific workloads. With a cloud deployment, you can reduce the time it takes to create a service for your internal stakeholders, you can move large, data-intensive workloads to the cloud, and you can create tools and templates that enable a self-service environment.

Common AWS Hybrid Cloud Workloads

Many customers choose to move to the cloud at their own pace. Their first workloads serve as proof-of-concepts for mission-critical applications. Some of the primary initial use cases for a hybrid cloud include:

• Disaster Recovery (DR)/Backup
• Application Development and Testing
• Web Servers
• HR, Payroll, Active Directory, and Productivity Applications

Example: AWS Hybrid Cloud Backup

The journey to the cloud is rarely accomplished in a single step. Once a customer has moved traditional IT deployments, dev/test environments, and productivity applications, they are ready to start looking at advanced or mission-critical workloads. This next phase can include items such as:

• Databases and Data Warehouses
• BI (Business Intelligence) and Analytics
• Enterprise Applications such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)
• HPC (High Performance Computing)

Example: Hybrid Analytics Model

Many organizations are moving their workloads to the AWS Cloud to simplify infrastructure management, modernize applications, increase agility, and innovate more quickly at a lower cost. In doing so, many organizations are finding that a hybrid cloud approach provides them the responsiveness and cost effectiveness they require for mission-critical applications.

To learn more about AWS hybrid cloud solutions, visit the Building Your Hybrid Cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS webpages, or learn more about AWS Outposts, a new set of hybrid cloud solutions.