What Is a Hybrid Data Center?

A hybrid data center refers to a combination of cloud-based and on-premises infrastructures that enables the sharing of applications and data between the data centers using a network. 

One of the main hybrid data center benefits is it allows a company to achieve business agility, scale on demand, and strike a balance between the flexibility of private cloud and public cloud data centers and the advantages of housing data and processes on-premises. This allows for a wide range of IT possibilities, from container orchestration to on-premises redundant servers, without having to invest heavily upfront.

With hybrid data center services, your organization benefits from the advantages of public and private cloud, as well as on-premises environments.

Private cloud is a cloud architecture that gives you exclusive use of cloud resources. You do not share any of your infrastructure with another entity.

Public cloud data centers are shared with more than one user. The data gets stored on a shared server, and a cloud service provider manages it.

In an on-premises data center, the server that stores and manages the data is kept within the premises of your company. This brings the advantage of added security for sensitive data because you have the option of setting up your own physical security systems to guard the server.

Securing a hybrid data center involves a combination of other data center security principles, but the process is typically more complex. The applications and data kept in the cloud will need different security than those kept on-premises. In the event a process needs to be moved from on-premises to the cloud, for example, you would need a flexible solution that keeps it protected even after it has migrated to the cloud environment. 

Therefore, security for a hybrid data center needs to be:

1. Borderless: The simplest solutions need to work regardless of where the data or process being protected is located. This kind of borderless security allows you to choose the resources you need without having to worry about slips in protection.
2. Unified: Everything needs to fall under the same security umbrella and be manageable using a single workstation. Even if multiple solutions are used, their management and control need to be unified so one entity can secure the hybrid environment.
3. Simplified and automated: With the diversity of environments introduced by a hybrid data center, the need to automate security processes increases. This is because while monitoring and maintaining visibility between multiple environments increases, the chances of human error also grows significantly. Automating as many security processes and ensuring the simplicity of your security architecture would reduce the chances of something going wrong.
4. Granular: To adequately protect a hybrid data center setup, you need to attain granular visibility into not only isolated processes but also those involving the transmission of data between your on-premises and cloud data centers.
5. Flexible and scalable: Because cloud environments give you flexible infrastructures that can change according to need, your security needs to be able to do the same.
6. Redundant and resilient: In the event of an outage or interruption, your hybrid architecture will need to enable resiliency, and this may require redundancy. Therefore, your security solution has to have similar resiliency and redundancy to keep your environment protected if the need arises.
7. Dynamic: Hybrid data center security, whether it is protecting a large, hyperscale data center, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment, or a simple, on-prem/public cloud setup, needs to be able to change along with the configuration of the network. In this way, you can make changes to the network without having to worry about the alterations introducing vulnerabilities.