The concept of hybrid is very, very misunderstood. Hybrid is not the compromise of “avoiding the cloud” vs. “going all-in on cloud”.  Hybrid is not the curse of carrying legacy baggage into modern service delivery architectures. Hybrid is also so much more than just a choice of resource location. Most surprisingly, hybrid is not just for clouds.

Whether hybrid is something you celebrate or curse is a direct result of viewing hybrid as more than just a tradeoff between cloud and on-premises resource location.

To maintain a competitive advantage, hybrid architectures must dynamically make choices that deliver optimal availability, latency, bandwidth, cost structure — and of course the assurance of security and compliance across an ever-evolving service model.

Key considerations in architecting the hybrid experience include:

  • How to balance resource locations (on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, multi-cloud)
  • What resources are being consumed? (apps, desktops, workspaces, data, APIs, micro-services)
  • When to dynamically utilize each of the four predominant resource delivery methods – (direct, virtualized, containerized, and proxied)
  • How can you design a superior user experience that hides all of this hybrid complexity?
  • How do you manage, optimize, troubleshoot and report on all of this hybrid complexity?
  • How much cloud is too much cloud?

An essential component of any hybrid architecture is a service-oriented networking strategy — and this is especially true when discussing the unique needs of hybrid cloud environments. Networking provides interconnectivity, management, visibility and control across hybrid architectures and multiple clouds. Networking integrates service load balancing, identity and access management, contextual policies, security services, analytics and reporting. Networking is the secret to leveraging hybrid as a sustaining competitive advantage.

With networks being more important to computing than ever, hybrid cloud success depends on the effectiveness of your networking strategy.

Join Citrix at BlackHat 2018 for a highly-interactive workshop where we will showcase network architectural considerations that have been proven in the real world to optimize and secure apps, data and workspaces. The workshop will feature Citrix networking solutions, including Citrix ADC, Citrix Gateway, Citrix Web App Firewall and the Management and Analytics Service with demos and hybrid use cases.

While our BlackHat workshop will be focused on the networking aspects of hybrid, visit the Citrix booth to discuss all the other ways that embracing hybrid has enabled competitive advantage for our customers.  And, let’s continue the discussion on the evolving concept of hybrid by providing your comments!

I hope to see you at BlackHat 2018.

— Kurt