According to 451 Research, 96% of enterprises are actively pursuing a hybrid IT strategy. Modern, real-time businesses require accelerated cycles of innovation that are expensive and difficult to maintain with legacy data platforms. Cloud technologies and respective service providers have evolved solutions to address these challenges.
The hybrid cloud’s premise—two data architectures fused together—gives companies options to leverage those solutions and to address decision-making criteria, on a case-by-case basis.
But how did the hybrid cloud come to dominate the data sector?
1960s
Just like the Internet, the cloud computing concept was born when the U.S. Department of Defense established the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). This archaic version of our internet was the first time (mainframe) computers interacted with each other. This was also the first time that users could share the same computer resource simultaneously.
1970s
Virtual machines came to be, and this meant that several (virtual) environments with their own operating systems could run in one physical computer.
1980s
Network operating systems let computers communicate with each other; and data storage grew—a 5MB hard drive was considered limitless in 1983 (when compared to a magnetic drum with memory capacity of 10 kB from the 1960s). The amount of data being collected grew, and the first data warehouses were developed.
1990s
In 1991, the World Wide Web (WWW) launched, and distributed computing in the form of the client-server model started to take shape. Brand-new virtualized private network connections allowed users to share access to the same physical infrastructure. “Big Data” became a topic of conversations and the term “Cloud” was coined.
By the end of the decade, companies started to offer enterprise applications over the web—Software-as-a-Service arrived.
2000s
Tech giants began to work on developing cloud-based services—like storage and computation—and offering them to clients. At the time, the architecture typically included two tiers, where cloud providers hosted the backend and clients sent their requests via web applications.
As businesses began to embrace digital transformation, more and more data was collected and stored. The Hadoop framework was developed for storing and processing huge datasets, with an initial goal to index the WWW.
In addition to SaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) became commercial products. In 2008, Cloudera was born.
2010s
As cloud offerings grew, so did the demand for higher agility, speed, and cost efficiency. It became clear that not everything can be hosted in a public cloud for multiple reasons, including security. So private clouds, or on-premises data centers, became more suitable for sensitive data.
In 2019, Cloudera launched the industry’s first enterprise data cloud, Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), which provides enterprise IT with the ability to deliver analytics-as-a-service in any cloud environment, while providing rich data security and lineage capabilities that minimize risk. As a vendor-agnostic canvas, a hybrid cloud helps to deliver fit-for-purpose solutions instead of point-based solutions that solve one particular problem at a time.
Modern Day and the Future
Today, hybrid cloud adoption continues to grow. Among the many benefits of hybrid cloud architecture, there are three main advantages:
- Economic: Hybrid cloud enables a value-driven approach to determine whether renting (public cloud) or buying (private cloud) makes the most economic sense for a particular use case.
- Operational: New projects are challenged with the unknown. A public cloud launch affords the flexibility and time to evaluate actual infrastructure requirements before private cloud capital investments are made.
- Functional: Hybrid cloud enables to unleash the full capabilities of on-premises apps by bursting to the public cloud in order to leverage on-demand infrastructure for highly computational workloads.
As the latest technology—edge computing, machine learning, and IoT—continues to evolve along with cloud computing, analysts are expecting hybrid cloud adoption to accelerate.
According to Mordor Intelligence, the hybrid cloud market was valued at $52.16 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $145 billion by 2026. Find out more about how a hybrid cloud approach can help you stay ahead of the competition in this whitepaper.
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