What is Cloud Bursting and When Should IT Leaders Use It?

Cloud computing is an infinite resource that many businesses and enterprises take advantage of. Yet for many large firms focused on their data center or private cloud services, the public cloud, typically provided by Amazon AWS, Google, Microsoft or other providers, is often overlooked due to compliance or security reasons.

As demand exceeds capacity and there’s no time to consider an upgrade or look at costly additions to your private cloud resources, making use of the public cloud – or, cloud bursting – as it is known, is an efficient and low-cost way to meet those spikes without impacting business operations or efficiency.

What is cloud bursting?

Cloud bursts can be triggered automatically during unexpected peaks, or mandated as part of IT’s management resources when there are seasonal or other regular boosts for demand or activity. Consider the approach similar to that employed by load balancers to ensure the smooth running of a network.

Cloud bursting provides many benefits as an ad hoc solution to business problems, helping keep costs down and improving the flexibility of the company to respond to changing conditions. This also supports business continuity efforts, and helps firms that see large spikes cope with increased demand.

Services firms that are growing fast may also find demand for their digital products or applications outstrips their available resources. Cloud bursting can be one way to mitigate this until they can get more permanent resources on board.

Typical examples of cloud bursting usage may be the launch of a big data or analytics project where the initial volume of data overwhelms the originally assigned resources. Another would be a new marketing effort for a fresh product or service that generates huge interest and sees large numbers of new sign-ups consuming storage or resources.

The risks and challenges of cloud bursting

Many businesses still avoid the public cloud due to the security or compliance challenges, and these remain the same even when a business believes that occasional use of cloud bursting doesn’t create any risks.

Any cloud bursting efforts must be scoped out beforehand to ensure:

• Sufficient levels of security are in place
• Data protection and encryption have been implemented to the appropriate standards
• All compliance and vertical legislation are followed

The IT team must also ensure:

• Clouds or on-premises systems are interoperable
• There’s no risk of data duplication
• Cloud bursting can be achieved either by moving the whole application to the public cloud, or data can be streamed between resources effectively