What is a hybrid cloud?

A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment in which an organization provides and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally. For example, an organization might use a public cloud service, such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for general computing but store customer data within its own data center.

Although cloud computing is often said to be the future of the industry, the hybrid model is more prevalent for a number of reasons. Large enterprises often already have substantial investments in the infrastructure required to provide resources in-house. Furthermore, many organizations would prefer to keep sensitive data under their own control to ensure security.

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