Hybrid clouds combine a private cloud with a public cloud, alleviating data privacy worries from your company if sensitive or corporate data needs to be kept on premise, whilst placing less critical environments into public cloud. Hybrid clouds are also useful for scalability.
Cost
The cost of using varying hybrid cloud platforms will most probably be the first thing you look at. It’s what you will care about, and what your customers will also care about in the long run. However, a decision should not be based on cost alone, as choosing the wrong provider who was cheap will cost you more dearly in the future.
SLAs
A cloud SLA (service level agreement) is a contract written up by a provider which guarantees services such as reliability, uptime, and scalability. SLA’s can be specifically tailored to your company size, location, and goals, and are an important part of a Service offering. Make sure you get the best availability and latency options for your company.
Open or closed?
Choosing an open source cloud provider, such as one that uses OpenStack, could be best for your firm if you want to avoid vendor lock-in and really believe in ‘open’ technology. It’s innovative, and is always improving. However, some OpenStack models simply won’t have the support in place like other providers have, which could mean extra costs in hiring a cloud management company.
Location
If latency is critical to your applications, think about running them on-premise rather than publicly. Furthermore, if your public cloud provider is based in a different region or country, ie, they don’t have hardware in your area, think about that impact that could have on latency and data regulations for your company.
