By Emily Jacobs
Hybrid or multi-cloud deployment is the most cost-effective and efficient method for a business to manage abundant cloud computing resources, say cloud-computing experts at the University of Sydney.
The School of Information Technologies’ Centre for Distributed and High Performance Computing has endorsed the hybrid cloud model because it “combines the best of both private and public clouds”.
Dr Young Choon Lee, a research fellow at the centre says the hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud computing environment offers without exposing the organisation’s applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities such as hacking.
“A business or organisation might use a public cloud service such as Amazon EC2, MS Azure or Google Compute Engine to process and archive burly data, but continue to utilise its in-house storage capacity for operational or day-to-day data,” he said.
Lee added that the trade-off between cost and performance, the two main and conflicting objectives in the hybrid cloud, can be captured using pareto-optimality.
“The availability of virtually unlimited cloud resource with the elasticity of public clouds in particular is a great opportunity for a business yet determining the best resource provisioning level is an open question,” he said.
Professor Albert Zomaya, Chair of High Performance Computing and Network at the University of Sydney says it is critical we develop models for the best use of cloud resources and traditional data centres.
“Data centre usage can be below twenty per cent. Under usage causes a number of issues including the ineffective use of energy and excessive costs,” he said.
Consumption levels can also be addressed under this new method.
“While sensitive data and time critical workloads are processed in their private cloud, the rest may be offloaded to public clouds,” said Professor Zomaya.
However, security is still a main concern for businesses and regulatory compliance requirements such as privacy and confidentiality must be considered.
