What Is Hybrid Infrastructure?
Hybrid infrastructure refers to an environment that combines on-premises data centers, private cloud, and public cloud services with high-performance components. A hybrid infrastructure includes secure facilities, bare metal hardware, and shared services and also extends to high-performance colocation, network services, and managed services.
Hybrid infrastructure supports modern application architectures, leveraging the strengths of each component to achieve a flexible, scalable, and efficient global-ready computing environment.
Why Is Hybrid Infrastructure Needed?
Organizations adopt hybrid infrastructure to address the limitations of their current ad-hoc, often poorly implemented systems. The goal is to refactor their inefficient, inflexible, and costly environment to securely scale connectivity and services across networks and to the network edge.
This transition is essential for businesses seeking to accommodate the needs of modern, data-intensive applications and performance-hungry workloads while responsibly managing long-term operational efficiency and sustainability. Failure to adopt a hybrid model can result in difficulties adapting to rapidly changing business environments, adopting technological advancements, circumventing vendor lock-in, and containing expense.
Gartner's analysis underscores the necessity for such a transition, pointing towards the need to:
- Optimize and refactor sometimes-costly cloud infrastructure
- Embrace new types of infrastructure for emerging applications
- Address the skills challenges in connecting modern IT environments
Research from 451 Alliance more pointedly demonstrates this shift. In 2022, more than half (54%) of organizations moved data and applications from public clouds back to data centers.
Benefits of Hybrid Infrastructure
Organizations can leverage a customized hybrid mix of colocation services, bare metal hardware, and edge computing alongside public and private cloud technologies to achieve significant cost savings, flexible and scalable operations, and greater control, ensuring efficient resource allocation and quick response to business and technology changes.
Increased Flexibility
Embrace versatility to leverage cutting-edge cloud, network, and edge technologies while retaining control over essential high-performance workloads.
Immense Scale
Enhance on-demand performance by quickly adjusting your infrastructure to align with changing demands and avoid expensive downtime.
Reduced Costs
Achieve cost-effective IT management with a hybrid infrastructure that blends resources and tailors your IT expenditure to your unique requirements.
Why Would an Organization Choose Hybrid Infrastructure?
An organization may choose hybrid infrastructure if they need to:
- Quickly adapt to market changes and customer demands
- Facilitate the adoption of emerging technologies like AI and IoT
- Bring processing closer to the user to enhance customer experience
- Gain more control over their data for security and compliance
How to Choose the Right Hybrid Infrastructure for Your Business
- Hybrid Configuration Assessment: How should we distribute workloads between on-premises, cloud, and edge environments? What expertise should we expect from a partner for effective deployment and migration? How does colocation and bare metal hardware factor into this equation?
- Edge Computing Capability: Does the partner offer specialized resources, configurations, and expertise for edge computing to enhance performance and reduce latency? How can cloud adjacency help with meeting end-user performance and experience requirements?
- Data and Compliance Management: Can the partner assist in meeting compliance standards and managing data sovereignty, especially in a global hybrid environment running resource-hungry distributed workloads and modern data-intensive applications?
- Infrastructure Management and Support: What advanced management solutions, networking capabilities, and technical skills does the partner offer for complex hybrid infrastructure crossing on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge computing? What level of technical support, expertise, and service level agreements are available?
- Security and Data Protection: What level of security does the partner offer for hybrid architecture, including physical (buildings and machines) and cybersecurity measures (systems and data)?
- Cost Management and Efficiency: How does the partner optimize costs, and what automation strategies and tools do they provide for effective resource management? Can they assist in aligning CapEx and OpEx budgeting requirements with the delivery and management of the environment?
- Resource Scalability and Sustainability: How does the partner accommodate future growth and changing needs, and how easily can resources be scaled up or down? How does their physical presence align with our long-term goals for sovereignty and sustainability?
Follow the Best Paths to Fast, Resilient, and Sustainable Operations
Colocation services should offer a full range of cabinet, cage, and suite options with customizable power, connectivity, and security options to enable ongoing growth and sustainability.
Select server options that can be deployed with the operating system of your choice within a customizable infrastructure that provides you with full control over your hardware.
Consider options for cloud-adjacent agility and cost-effectiveness of easy, on-demand access to public cloud services alongside super-fast, secure connections to high-performance systems.
Layer your infrastructure on a global network backbone that lets you efficiently move workloads and data within the data center, between data centers, and between cloud platforms so you can deliver enhanced end-user experiences that thrive on the right infrastructure.
Evocative Hybrid Infrastructure Maximizes Business Agility and Scalability
Evocative helps businesses execute on their hybrid infrastructure strategies with high-performance colocation, network, bare metal, cloud, and managed services. Evocative provides a secure platform and a global network presence to help you embrace modern application architectures.
Our 24 data centers, 32 points of presence, and carrier-neutral network access with available cloud adjacency offers a full suite of high-performance infrastructure facilities and services that can scale to the network edge so you can power the demanding workloads of tomorrow.
1. Gartner,
Gartner Says Four Trends Are Shaping the Future of Cloud, Data Center and Edge Infrastructure, May 2023
2. 451 Alliance,
Cloud Repatriation: The Who, The Where, The Why, December 2022
