Role of Data Communications in Hybrid Cloud Costs

Rapid adoption of cloud services in recent years has been driven by multiple factors, such as faster time-to-market and improved scalability enabled by public cloud infrastructure. Hybrid clouds, combining the in-house capacities with on-demand capacity of public clouds, achieve both the increased utilization rate of the in-house infrastructure and the limited use of more expensive public cloud, thereby lowering the total costs for the cloud user. In this paper, an analytical model of hybrid cloud costs is introduced, wherein the costs of computing and data communication are taken into account. Using this model, the cost-efficient division of the computing capacity between the private and the public portion of a hybrid cloud can be identified. By analyzing the model, it is shown analytically that the greater the volume of data transferred to/from the public cloud, the greater portion of the capacity should be allocated to the private cloud.