Businesses are Tackling Data Privacy Restrictions with Hybrid Cloud

If a business deals with personal data, it inevitably faces data protection and privacy legislation issues. Here is how the hybrid cloud helps address those.

The hybrid cloud market is projected to grow to $173.3 bn by 2025 at a 22.5% yearly rate. Driven by the cost-efficiency, security, scalability, growing need for interoperability standards, and other factors, hybrid cloud is being increasingly picked by global businesses and IT professionals as their preferred cloud deployment.

In response to the increased demand, providers amp up the efforts in hybrid cloud solutions development to stay competitive. In the past few months, IBM has acquired Turbonomic to continue building an AIOps solution for the hybrid cloud. Cisco has added a new class of servers embracing hybrid cloud architecture, while Nvidia launched AI edge and hybrid cloud services to support enterprise workloads.

Key use cases of hybrid cloud

Smooth transition into the cloud

Large enterprises are often unable to immediately transition into cloud infrastructure due to compliance procedures, the sensitive nature of data, and security bias. They use hybrid as an intermediary solution, either keeping a small part of data on-premise and moving the rest into the cloud or moving gradually, starting from the less critical infrastructure elements.

Cost management

Even in the hybrid version, the cloud comes at a lower upfront cost. Unlike on-premise servers adding to capex, costs of cloud infrastructure are counted towards opex, allowing for more flexible cost management.

Temporary scaling

Hybrid cloud efficiently accommodates the need for an increased system capacity for a short period. Businesses can pay for as much capacity as they need, for as long as they need it.

Backup and DR site

Having an infrastructure backup for emergency cases makes the system restoration way quicker than fixing the issue locally.

Edge computing

Channel bandwidth of some offices is not enough to quickly transfer big data from local centers to the cloud and get back the result. Hybrid cloud setup allows processing data locally, getting the result, and uploading it into the cloud to share with other local centers.

However, the tightened approach governments take with data, increasingly prohibiting data storage and migration abroad with privacy laws, represent another use case – and one of the most important ones.

Data regulation and hybrid cloud

If a business gathers, uses, or stores personal data, the physical location of servers that are used for that purpose becomes of paramount importance. Most countries in the world have adopted data privacy laws to control over collecting and processing of information of their citizens. Failure to comply with those regulations can result in fines, lawsuits, or other forms of law enforcement, depending on the jurisdiction.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a document in EU law, which addresses data privacy, as well as the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas, is a prime example of such restriction. For example, if an American company keeps data of EU citizens on servers in the US, it is now in a direct breach of GDPR due to the ability of the US government to access the data for security purposes.

Although the USA does not have a single comprehensive law governing data privacy, multiple documents, including The Federal Trade Commission Act, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), impose restrictions related to personal data processing. Brazil, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and other countries have their own versions of GDPR.

Those regulations impose the requirement to store data in the country where it originates. As a result, global enterprises, in order to comply, adopt hybrid cloud solutions. Using a mix of on-premises servers, private cloud, and public cloud services with comprehensive orchestration, hybrid cloud provides more data deployment options without breaching data privacy regulation.

How to deploy a compliant hybrid cloud solution

Data inventory

Successful deployment of a hybrid cloud infrastructure requires taking into consideration the content of data when deciding which datasets to be stored on-premises and which ones can be transferred into the cloud.

Infrastructure audit

An In-depth assessment of the existing infrastructure – data centers, tools, applications, and staff training – can significantly mitigate the risks of cloud migration.

Continuous updates and improvement

Ongoing assessment of security gaps and data processing practices ensures that the infrastructure stays compliant with local regulations.

To sum up, leveraging the hybrid cloud is the optimal solution for global enterprises aiming to stay compliant with data residency regulations, while ‘pure’ public or private clouds are more suitable for small and medium businesses. Hybrid cloud enables companies to utilize cost-efficient public cloud for non-regulated data while using on-premises servers to store sensitive information.