The transformative network of cloud computing models spans into three major types – Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud. Though public and private clouds are no longer an option for most organizations, hybrid cloud infrastructures are making their way and considered as the best cloud practice today.

Businesses now also seeking versatility in choosing which public cloud is used and the ability to move between cloud infrastructure. So, connecting private and public cloud remains challenging. Instead of exploring the seamless cloud applications that can meet and fulfill all of an organization's needs, IT professionals have to look for specific cloud storage use cases for solutions.

Analytics Insight has brought here top 5 cloud storage use cases for connecting private and public clouds.

Cloud as Primary Storage

Using the cloud as primary storage requires resolving any potential issues. Different from cloud backup and recovery, where the connection concern is mostly a bandwidth issue, primary storage is typically more transactional, making latency the primary concern. The major use for the cloud as primary storage is network-attached storage. Many vendors in this space focus on generating a cloud-hosted file system that can automatically make sure a copy of the most active data is on an on-premises appliance or edge device.

Cloud as Data Backup and Recovery

The most popular use for connecting on-premises infrastructure and public clouds is data backup and recovery. Due to technologies like compression, deduplication, and block-level incremental backups, the connection between an on-premises backup storage system and public cloud storage doesn't require to be particularly high speed. Today, major public cloud service providers, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM, offer a range of services to address data backup, application backup, disaster recovery, and other useful protective services.

Cloud as a Tier Data

Many storage systems today have the ability to move data from one tier of storage to another based on user-defined criteria. Using these multi-tier offerings, businesses can apply relatively small flash-based caches on-premises for active data, which is tiered to a geographically close secondary provider to store the hot data. Typically, the multi-tier primary cloud storage strategy supports multiple clouds, but since data is finally stored in a single cloud as a central repository, movement between providers is the same as any other migration effort.

Cloud Bursting

With a concrete cloud bursting strategy, businesses can design their data centers to meet the organizations' need. Most of the companies build their data centers, both in terms of storage and computing, for the uttermost scenario when demands are high and made on their resources, where most resources go fallow. So, when enough workloads are added and current resources close to the limits of a data center's capabilities, organizations typically focus on additional investment in these resources. This is where cloud bursting comes in. The main goal of cloud bursting is to break this expensive cycle of incessantly staying ahead of the demand curve by designing data centers.

Cloud as Old Data Archive

Traditional archive offerings require a significant upfront investment in a secondary storage system, generally 50 terabytes or more. But now, cloud archiving solves this problem by radically archiving data, on a per-gigabyte basis as necessary. It may be the best use case as it doesn't require any changes to network bandwidth and provides a significant return on investment. Most cloud archive offerings can send data to multiple clouds, and some can even support multiple clouds at the same time. Archive products have been examined on-premises production storage for data that has not been accessed in a user-defined period, usually more than a year.