Working of Cloud Bursting: Pros & Cons

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There is nothing more frightening than the mere thought of a cloud burst. As a matter of fact, it is no secret that a cloud burst from the sky can be a frightening incident, and such incidents are also known to damage a lot of things, but the type of cloud burst we’re talking about here has to do with the domain of cloud computing.

What is Cloud Bursting in Cloud Computing?

As the name implies, cloud bursting allows enterprises to extend their on-premise IT resources to the public cloud only when they need them to do so under specific circumstances, allowing them to rely on the public cloud whenever needed as well as providing peace of mind.

There may be two types of on-premise IT resources that are being discussed here: an in-house server setup, or a dedicated private cloud that makes use of virtualized resources to leverage the benefits of on-premise IT resources. Despite the fact that cloud bursting is, in theory, a good concept, there are a number of disadvantages and advantages associated with it.

Here, we will be covering some of the salient features of cloud bursting, along with a few of the pros and cons that it has to offer. It will also be discussed in detail how this phenomenon can have a positive impact on the outcomes that are desired within specific scenarios.

How Does Cloud Bursting Work?

There are certain thresholds that IT infrastructure & operations managers define based on the workloads they consider to be mission critical. The importance of this is especially evident when it comes to operations that deal directly with customers and can have a direct impact on their overall experience.

In the event that the defined usage thresholds of a workload or application are reached, as soon as they are achieved, a predefined segment of that workload or application is immediately replicated over to the public cloud environment of a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) such as Cyfuture Cloud.

There is a seamless transition that is the result of this process, and end users are unaware of the transition because it is obfuscated. The public cloud resources are immediately de-provisioned as soon as this spike in demand decreases to a level below the threshold defined by the cloud provider.

Benefits of Cloud Bursting

Cloud bursting is a cost-optimization tool that helps enterprises deploy clouds efficiently. In order to accomplish this, they maintain only the minimum amount of IT resources within their organisation, since they know they have a secure back-up in place in the event that the number of users suddenly increases.

It is also important to keep in mind that when an enterprise uses public cloud services in this way, they are just consuming those resources temporarily. Most of these public cloud providers have a “pay as you go” pricing model for their infrastructure or solutions, which is very useful in the case of a “pay as you go” pricing model.

Additionally, cloud bursts can help enterprises maintain a strong Business Continuity (BC) posture, in that the risk of a mission critical service going down completely or users experiencing a deteriorated experience in the event of a sudden spike in demand is mitigated.

Outlining the benefits of cloud bursting:

Downsides of Cloud Bursting

The data that is transferred between enterprise resources and the cloud provider could pose a significant security risk due to the possibility of sensitive information moving back and forth. There are several challenges that need to be overcome in order to ensure data security, privacy, and governance are met across both environments at the same level.

Even though lots of workloads can be transferred to the public cloud when there is a high demand for the service, network and bandwidth-related limitations may still result in a sub-par end user experience (UX) in the event of high demand. This problem is mainly due to the unavoidable latency issue.

When to Use Cloud Bursting?

After discussing how cloud bursts work, and their pros and cons, let’s now get into the specific scenarios in which this can be a good option to consider. When it comes to workloads that are not sensitive to regulations and are not involved in regulatory compliance, cloud bursts are more feasible.

In order to ensure the maximum benefits from cloud bursting, it is crucial that deploying enterprises adopt automated mechanisms as soon as they have reached critical usage thresholds for any mission-critical processes or applications in order to make the most of cloud bursting.

Although it is also possible to perform the same task manually, this would require a great deal of human involvement, and this may not be able to achieve the desired results. It is also important to remember this when de-provisioning cloud resources, once the usage levels have returned to a normal level.

Conclusion

A cloud bursting project can be a fruitful proposition when the right circumstances are in place, aided by automation and conducted under the right conditions. As a result, deploying enterprises will have to be extremely careful when it comes to ensuring their data security and regulatory compliance postures.

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