A hybrid cloud is a composition of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud. A hybrid cloud is typically offered in one of two ways: a vendor has a private cloud and forms a partnership with a public cloud provider, or a public cloud provider forms a partnership with a vendor that provides private cloud platforms.
A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment in which an organization provides and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally. Ideally, the hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities. This type of hybrid cloud is also referred to as hybrid IT.
Hybrid clouds are a combination of both public and private cloud models. Hybrid clouds are designed to extend a private cloud with the available resources of a public cloud. This is most often seen when an enterprise anticipates planned workload spikes that generally only requires additional compute resources for a limited period of times. Hybrid models introduce the additional complexity of distributing applications and data between a public and private cloud and require strong efforts around open standards, common APIs and common infrastructure to make this model possible.
