What is a hybrid cloud?
What is a hybrid cloud solution and how can it help you handle new and complex challenges within the digital sphere? Learn how to get a flexible and scalable solution that can be optimized to support your needs.
A hybrid cloud storage solution gives you the flexibility and scalability of a cloud solution, but also lets you have on-premise assets that are impractical to move to the cloud. Vidispine’s hybrid cloud storage solution, The VidiCore Server Agent (VSA), allows you to keep your original assets safely on-premise while still running a Vidispine solution in the VidiNet cloud infrastructure.
A hybrid cloud is simply a computing environment connecting a company’s private clouds and/or local storage with one or several public cloud services, creating a single, flexible infrastructure for running one’s applications and workloads. It gives you greater control of all your assets regardless of where you’re storing them, and a high level of flexibility when managing and creating content. One of the foremost benefits of a hybrid cloud platform is that it relies on a single plane of management, instead of a multi-cloud strategy where each cloud needs to be managed individually.
What is a VidiCore Server Agent?
The VidiCore Server Agent is simply the software that bridges the gap between the cloud, and your local files. It can be used as a secure gateway from a Vidispine instance to your on-premise files. The connection between the VSA and the VidiCore API allows you to manage, analyze, transcode, and conform the assets while they still are on-premise.
It gives you the scalability and flexibility of a cloud solution for your business logic and applications, making the move to a fully cloud-based storage smooth and easy, where you will still have access to all of Vidispine’s storage features.
The architecture of a hybrid cloud solution
The architecture required to be able to establish a hybrid cloud management platform is as follows:
- A public IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) platform, in the case of Vidispine this would be VidiNet
- Your own local storage and/or private cloud, either on your premises, or via a hosted private cloud provider such as Google, Amazon or Microsoft
- A sufficient wide area network (WAN) connection between the IaaS platform, and the storages
The structure of a hybrid cloud solution allows for uniform management of all cloud environments, reducing the likelihood of process redundancies that individual management of cloud environments often suffers from. Another risk with individually managed cloud environments is the increased risk of security loopholes if the solutions aren’t fully optimized towards each other.
Benefits of a hybrid cloud solution
Scalability
A hybrid cloud management platform is particularly valuable for businesses and industries with a dynamic or highly changeable workload and demands spikes. Rather than investing in expensive resources to be able to keep up with the demands of one week, and then having it sit idle the next, a hybrid cloud solution from Vidispine offers extreme scalability in all directions, on all levels, where you scale both upwards and downwards in the blink of an eye to match your current needs.
Cost-effectiveness
In connection with scalability, cost-effectiveness follows suit. With complete scalability and our pay-as-you-go pricing model, you only pay for what you use.
Flexibility
The main benefits of a hybrid cloud solution stem from its ability to give a company increased control over their assets and data. In essence, a hybrid cloud solution allows you to choose from several different storage options to match the needs of each individual use case.
Security
Hybrid cloud platforms allow for both on-premise private clouds where you can store your most sensitive or critical files and workloads, and use public clouds via a third-party provider to host your less-critical files such as test or development workloads.
Interconnectivity
The defining factor of a hybrid cloud solution is the interconnectivity between different clouds in connection with how workloads are moved, management is unified and processes are put into action. It is also this interconnectivity that allows you to run all of Vidispine’s solutions in the VidiNet cloud infrastructure wherever you want, whenever you want, without having to move your files.
Invest in a hybrid cloud solution with Vidispine
Businesses and industries are becoming more digital, and unless your organization was born on the cloud, there is more than likely you have a wide range of applications and workloads spread across a number of private clouds, public clouds and local storages. To be able to handle new and complex needs within the digital sphere, IT needs to become more flexible and provide more alternatives to choose from. By investing in a hybrid cloud solution from Vidispine you will get access to the flexibility you need to optimize how to support your business.
For those who need enterprise-level cloud computing services it often pays to work with different cloud services and providers and put them together in a hybrid cloud, run through a cloud management software platform. Contact Vidispine today for more information about our hybrid cloud solutions and how it compares to other hybrid platforms such as the AWS hybrid cloud.