A hybrid cloud data centre setup is an infrastructure model that combines two distinct environments into one working system. On one side you have colocation, which means your own physical servers and equipment housed in a professionally managed facility, such as ours in Maidstone. On the other side you have public cloud, meaning capacity rented from providers such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. The two environments are joined by dedicated, low latency network connectivity, so that data and applications can move between them as required, and so that from an operational standpoint they function as a single environment rather than two separate systems that happen to sit near each other.
The word hybrid gets used loosely in the industry, so it is worth being specific about what it actually means in practice. It does not mean a fixed fifty fifty split, and it does not mean every business ends up in the same configuration. Some businesses colocate the bulk of their infrastructure and use public cloud only for occasional bursts of extra capacity. Others run their core applications in public cloud and colocate only the systems that need to stay under their direct physical control, such as databases holding sensitive customer data. The mix depends entirely on what the business actually runs and what its constraints are.
It helps to think about where the industry has come from. A number of years ago, the prevailing advice was to move everything to public cloud, and a great many businesses did exactly that. What has become clear since is that public cloud is an excellent fit for some workloads and a poor fit for others, particularly workloads that run constantly, that need predictable performance, or that carry compliance obligations around where data physically sits. A noticeable number of businesses are now in the process of moving some of what they migrated to public cloud back into colocation, a trend often referred to as cloud repatriation. Hybrid is, in many cases, the practical middle ground that businesses arrive at once the initial “everything in the cloud” enthusiasm meets a few years of real invoices and real audits.
In everyday terms, a hybrid setup might look like this. A business runs its core financial system and its customer database on servers it owns, sitting in a rack at Vinters Connect, connected by a resilient network link. At the same time, that same business runs its website, its email, and a handful of development and testing environments in public cloud, where capacity can be scaled up or down within minutes depending on demand. Both environments are connected, so applications can talk to each other, data can be backed up between the two, and the business is not locked into treating either environment as the only option for everything it does.