The shift to the hybrid cloud is no longer a trend—it’s the infrastructure standard. Organizations adopt it for the flexibility, high resilience, and centralized control it offers. The combination of public cloud (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and private/on-prem environments allows IT managers to run workloads based on security, regulation, latency, and cost requirements. 

However, these benefits come with significant complexity: managing dual permissions, disparate security configurations, separate environments for monitoring/logs, and data gravity that hurts performance. To ensure the hybrid cloud functions as a single unit, and not two foreign systems, a well-planned architecture is essential, featuring a unified management layer, secure policies, and integrated connectivity.

Best Practice 1: A Unified Management Layer

A common mistake is treating public and private cloud environments as separate entities. This results in decentralized management, security vulnerabilities, and potential data leaks.

Advanced organizations adopt Multi-Cloud Management solutions like Azure Arc, Google Anthos, or VMware vRealize Suite. These tools provide a single, centralized control plane over all cloud and on-prem resources, including Kubernetes clusters, virtual machines, storage policies, and IAM permissions.

For example, a global FinTech company using AWS and a VMware private cloud transitioned to managing all environments through Anthos. This allowed them to run microservices-based applications on GKE while maintaining a secure connection to legacy backend services running in an EU data center.

Best Practice 2: Secure Network Connections—Beyond Basic VPN

Hybrid environments depend on reliable, high-speed communication between components. Direct Connect (AWS) or ExpressRoute (Azure) are recommended solutions for a secure, low-latency core connection between the data center and the public cloud.

Additionally, it is advised to:

• Use intelligent routing protocols like BGP for dynamic routing.

• Apply a uniform firewall policy (e.g., via Palo Alto or FortiGate in hybrid mode) across environments.

• Crucial Tip: For sensitive applications or high availability, do not rely on a single VPN. Design for redundancy with at least two communication paths and verify the internal DNS function in each region.

Best Practice 3: Zero Trust Starts with Identity

Managing identities and permissions is a serious challenge when each environment has a different IAM (Identity and Access Management) mechanism.

The solution is a centralized SSO (Single Sign-On) based on an IdP (such as Azure AD or Okta). This allows you to map users to permissions based on their Role, not their specific environment.

Furthermore, you must enforce:

• MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication).

• Session timeouts.

• Least Privilege policies across the board.

Best Practice 4: Coordinating Workloads and Data Gravity

Running applications against data stored in a different environment creates problematic latency and high Data Egress costs. Mitigation strategies include:

• Data replication and caching.

• Storage-disaggregation solutions like NetApp Data Fabric to reduce physical dependency and improve performance.

A frequent question is: “Where should we run our ML Models?”

If the sensitive data resides on-prem, the model training should likely occur there. However, the model inference can still be performed in the public cloud to take advantage of its superior scalability.

Conclusion: Avoiding the Double Price Tag

The hybrid cloud is not a one-off project; it is a philosophy. Only by integrating centralized management, network coordination, end-to-end security, and alignment between DevOps and SecOps can you ensure the system functions as a unified whole, rather than isolated islands. Otherwise, instead of reaping the benefits of both worlds, you will simply pay the price of both.

Based on an article by Miki Sela, Principal Account Manager at Sela, originally published on ITtime