Hybrid cloud is an IT architecture that incorporates some degree of workload portability, orchestration, and management across 2 or more environments. Depending on whom you ask, those environments may need to include:

The way public clouds and private clouds work as part of a hybrid cloud is no different than how standalone public clouds or private clouds work:

     * A local area network (LAN), wide area network (WAN), virtual private network (VPN), and/or application programming interfaces (APIs) connect multiple computers together.

     * Virtualization, containers, or software-defined storage abstract resources, which can be pooled into data lakes.

     * Management software allocates those resources into environments where applications can run, which are then provisioned on-demand with help from an authentication service.

Separate clouds become hybrid when those environments are connected as seamlessly as possible. That inter connectivity is the only way hybrid clouds work—and it’s why hybrid clouds are the foundation of edge computing. That inter connectivity is how workloads are moved, management is unified, and processes are orchestrated. How well-developed those connections are has a direct impact on how well your hybrid cloud works.

A properly designed, integrated, and managed hybrid cloud can be as secure as traditional on-premise IT infrastructure. While there are some unique hybrid cloud security challenges (like data migration, increased complexity, and a larger attack surface), the presence of multiple environments can be one of the strongest defenses against security risks. All those interconnected environments let enterprises choose where to place sensitive data based on requirements, and it lets security teams standardize redundant cloud storage that can augment disaster recovery efforts.