My stint with web hosting is over two decades long. From my earliest days of business when I started selling domain names and shared hosting plans, I have seen a serious transition in web hosting space. Inception of cloud servers is such a change that has lately became a game changer for businesses. The growing popularity of cloud computing and cloud based web applications compelled entrepreneurs and large scale enterprises to bring cloud hosting to their industries.
What Is Hybrid Cloud?
As the name suggests hybrid cloud server is a platform that combines the attributes of private cloud servers and public-based servers. In the arrangement, the accessibility of the platform is integrated into one hosted computing platform. The hybrid platform enables parallel cloud networks accessible through the same architecture, thus offers businesses an ability to employ the benefits of both the platforms including faster data transfer and increased privacy.
Hybrid cloud server enables users to develop own applications and process information securely over the private cloud network. In addition to that, hybrid cloud users are allowed to perform tasks such as sharing large amounts of resources and hosting publicly available data.
Why Hybrid Clouds Are Used?
Hybrid clouds are best fit for those businesses who need higher resource and capacity. They are in demand for their ability to offer flexibility, scalability and security over other types of hosting. They ensure such a level of performance that traditional cloud can't deliver. Here are some distinct advantages of hybrid clouds:
Improved Data Transfer Speed:
As hybrid networks are configured to transfer data through private servers, it improves the overall speed of data transfer.
Enhanced Security:
Hybrid cloud ensures maximum data security as sensitive data is transferred via private servers with many layers of encryption that can only be accessed in the house.
If you've outlined a plan to migrate to hybrid cloud server, but confused whether your business needs it or not, you have many reasons to do this. If you're a web development firm developing web based applications for your clients, hybrid cloud servers enable businesses to develop applications and programs in a secure environment with optimum speed and data storage.
If you have a bigger portfolio of clients, a hybrid cloud network allows storing client data on a private server. On the contrary, a public cloud network would be available to your clients to access project plans & collaborative data.
Put simply, the hybrid cloud lets you run some applications through your own infrastructure while transitioning other applications in a public cloud environment.
Hybrid web hosting offers several advantages if you’re expanding your business and looking for a scalable hosting solution. Businesses growing at the fastest pace need flexible and scalable web hosting. Hybrid cloud benefits such businesses as it can be scaled up or down to meet the demands in traffic and data storage. In the long run, it offers cost advantages as well.
Where Hybrid Clouds Are Lacking?
Despite so many visible business advantages, hybrid cloud server falls short at some points. Its dependency on just one network of servers is a serious cause of concern for the businesses. The scenario becomes worst when downtime occurs. Compliance conflicts are also reported sometimes, as both the parties are required to ensure that all services in use are in line with the company’s security policy.
Hybrid cloud configuration is a blunt example of a very complex system architecture. It needs to be managed by professionals who have expert knowledge of the security and technical aspects of the system, in order to reduce technical errors and security mishaps.
Data encryption is a method that enables companies to protect their important data from unauthorized access during transition. In simple terms, encryption is a method of safeguarding data from people you don't want to see it. When you enter your card details to complete a transaction on an e-commerce portal, encryption encrypts the information so that no one can breach or steal your personal data during the transfer process. Encryption is very useful if you want to secure sensitive information, emails and cloud storage.
Encryption is a very straight forward process. You have a message, you encode it using a secret cipher, and only other people with the cipher can read it. Others who attempt to read it, just see garbage.
Every entity uses this method in its own way. Whether it's to protect corporate secrets, secure classified information, and protect personal information, data encryption safeguards it in the way you want. Evidently, the main purpose of having encryption in place is to protect the confidentiality of digital data transmitted via the internet or other computer networks.
There are different methods used to implement data encryption. Some of them are enlisted here for your reference.
Hashing:
Hashing is a technique where a unique signature is created for a message or set of data. Hashing receives the data during transfer and creates hash out of it. Each hash created is unique to the specific message. That's is why any change or alteration made to the message can be easily tracked.
Symmetric Encryption:
In web hosting terminology, symmetric encryption is also known as private-key cryptography. In this method, a key is used to encrypt and decrypt the message. The key is responsible for transferring data from sender to recipient in secured manner. To ensure the encryption, both the encrypter and the decrypter should have access to the same key.
Asymmetric methods:
In Asymmetric method, two keys are used for encryption or decryption. One is the public key and other a private key. A public key is freely available to everyone and is used to encrypt the message while the private key is used by the recipient to decrypt the message.
As already mentioned, Encryption helps organizations to reap benefits of infrastructure as a service, while ensuring the data privacy. The encryption also helps in reducing cost by adding multi-tenancy in cloud environment. If you encrypt data before it enters the cloud, and hold the control of the encryption keys, you can ensure complete data safety. Another key benefit of encryption is that encrypting your data on cloud and holding your own key is the safest mode.
Being a cloud service provider, safety and security of customer's data should always be your first priority. Hackers are always look at an opportunity to sneak in into your information territory. That is why you should significantly improve your information security using Encryption and key management software, specially made for virtualized environments.