Sometimes, Hussey explains, the demands of a particular application make the hybrid cloud model an obvious fit. He points to police body camera footage, which requires an on-premises component, although the cloud ultimately stores and processes the video data. “Just because of the sheer volume of the data we’re pushing to the cloud, we have staging servers on-premises,” Hussey says. “We take the police video, stage it locally and then the on-premises infrastructure pushes it to the cloud when there’s availability.”
A hybrid cloud approach also accommodates testing and development, Fletcher says. “In some cases, we may run production on-premises and then have a test environment in the cloud. That allows you to scale up and down more dynamically.”
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California Agency Gains Security in the Cloud
The California State Lands Commission began moving toward a hybrid cloud approach last year, when the agency’s parent organization consolidated its data centers. By moving some resources to Microsoft Azure, the commission was able to take advantage of some features that were not available on-premises, says David Swander, systems administrator for the organization.
“Our security stance went way up as a result of features set in the cloud,” Swander says. “We were able to implement formal authentication for every user and block certain regions from accessing resources. That’s one of the huge benefits of us moving out there.”