In recent years, the cloud has become an increasingly popular choice for businesses looking to improve their IT infrastructure. While there are several cloud providers to choose from, Google Cloud stands out as the top choice for businesses looking to implement a hybrid cloud model. With its powerful infrastructure and wide range of services, Google Cloud offers a unique blend of scalability, flexibility, and security, making it an ideal choice for companies of all sizes. This blog post will explore why Google Cloud is an excellent choice for businesses looking to implement a hybrid cloud model and how it can help them achieve their goals.

But first, what is cloud computing?

As more and more businesses embrace digital transformation, cloud computing has become an essential tool for managing and delivering modern IT services. Cloud computing falls under two main categories: Private cloud and public cloud.

A public cloud is owned and managed by a cloud service provider, who makes computing resources (such as servers, storage, and networking) available to the general public over the internet. Customers can access and use these resources on a pay-per-use basis without investing in their own infrastructure.

On the other hand, a private cloud is owned and managed by a single organisation for its own use. The infrastructure may be located on-premises or in a data centre, and the organisation has complete control over the infrastructure, including security, networking, and storage.

A clear differentiator here is that public cloud platforms operate on a massive scale, which allows them to offer computing resources at a lower cost than many private cloud deployments and can easily scale up or down to meet changing business needs, allowing businesses to rapidly provision and de-provision computing resources as needed. Private clouds, on the other hand, may be limited by the amount of hardware that has been deployed.

Why hybrid cloud?

However, not all businesses are ready to move entirely to the public cloud, whether it’s for data sovereignty reasons where compliance requires certain data to remain on specific on-premise infrastructure within a particular region, or if the business simply does not have the resources to fund the migration of all their workloads to the public cloud.

Thus, many are looking for a hybrid approach that allows them to leverage the benefits of both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. This approach is particularly attractive to businesses with complex workloads, sensitive data, and unique performance requirements.

While evaluating a hybrid cloud approach, it is important to identify which workloads are best suited to the cloud and which need to remain on-premises. The majority of workloads and services will need to work together, so it is vital to select the right public cloud platform whose services can integrate well with the existing on-premise infrastructure.

What is it & why choose Google Cloud?

Google Cloud is a cloud computing platform that offers a wide range of services, including compute, data, storage, networking, security, and machine learning. Google Cloud’s hybrid cloud capabilities make it an excellent choice for businesses that need to deploy and manage applications across both on-premises and cloud environments.

Google Cloud’s Anthos platform allows businesses to manage workloads across multiple environments, including Google Cloud, on-premises, and other cloud providers. This means that companies can choose the best deployment option for their needs without worrying about vendor lock-in or compatibility issues. Google also has a strong focus on Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration system that simplifies the deployment and management of containerized applications. This makes deploying and managing applications across a hybrid cloud environment easier.

Hybrid connectivity is another critical component in establishing communication between the two infrastructures.

GCP offers several options for hybrid connectivity, including:

Cloud VPN: Allows organisations to create a secure, encrypted tunnel between their on-premises network and Google Cloud virtual private cloud (VPC) networks.

Cloud Interconnect: Cloud Interconnect: Extends your on-premises network to Google’s network through a highly available, low latency connection. You can use Dedicated Interconnect to connect directly to Google (Up to 200 Gbps) or use Partner Interconnect (Up to 50 Gbps) to connect to Google through a supported service provider.

It is important to note that Google Cloud’s global network consists of more than 30 regions, 105 zones, and 175 Network edge locations. It is available in 200+ countries and territories, with a private global fibre network spanning more than 150,000 miles connecting its data centres and PoPs. In addition, Google Cloud uses edge caching to store frequently accessed content at PoPs around the world. This means that customers can access content faster without having to go all the way to the origin server.

In conclusion, cloud computing has become an essential tool for businesses looking to modernise their IT services, with public and private cloud being the two main deployment options. However, hybrid cloud is becoming increasingly popular as it allows businesses to leverage the benefits of both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Google Cloud is a leading cloud computing platform that offers a wide range of services with hybrid cloud capabilities, making it an excellent choice for businesses looking to deploy and manage applications across multiple environments. Google Cloud’s global network presence, hybrid connectivity options and focus on Anthos & Kubernetes make it an attractive option for businesses with complex workloads and unique performance requirements.

Whether you’re considering a move to the cloud or want to know more about how a hybrid model could benefit your business, contact our dedicated cloud experts today!