What is a hybrid cloud?

A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud, and third-party public cloud services and coordinates between these platforms. This typically involves connections from on-premises data centers to public clouds. Connections may also involve other private assets, including edge devices or other cloud services such as storage.

The concept of hybrid multi cloud architecture reflects the modern idea that IT resources and services are not singular or ubiquitous, but complex and dynamic combinations of hardware, applications, resources and services. All of these different assets can be operated by many providers and delivered to the enterprise on demand from countless locations around the world.
How does a hybrid cloud work?

In a hybrid cloud model, enterprises deploy workloads in private IT environments or public clouds (including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), and can often move workloads and data between them as computing needs and costs change. This provides enterprises with greater flexibility and more choices for data deployment. Hybrid cloud workloads include networking, hosting, and web serving functions of applications.

For example, a typical hybrid cloud might involve the following two common components:

Local. One or more applications deployed in a traditional on-premises data center. These on-premises workloads are often mission-critical, with regulatory or business pressures requiring direct control of on-premises infrastructure, applications, and data.
cloud. One or more application and data stores deployed to a selected region (data center) of a public cloud provider. These deployments typically reflect less critical or less used workloads and data, and short-term or experimental deployments. Enterprises manage and interact with public clouds through the cloud provider's portal and APIs. It is becoming more common for enterprises to leverage multiple public clouds in order to benefit from each cloud's unique resource or service offerings.
PaaS and SaaS. One or more applications and data stores hosted by PaaS and SaaS providers. These are often workloads that the business needs but chooses not to deploy and operate on-premises. Common SaaS examples include human resources, accounting, finance, business intelligence, and software development kits.