Design principles

Deploy connectivity for scalability: Hybrid network connectivity scales dynamically with your business and application needs. Your application performance requirements will determine which network factors to prioritized: bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss. Bandwidth determines your connection's data transfer rate. Latency measures packet travel time between endpoints and increases with distance due to the speed of light. Jitter indicates how consistent your network latency remains over time. Packet loss quantifies what percentage of network traffic fails to reach its destination. As your business evolves, performance requirements may shift. You might need to prioritize different factors or implement solutions that address multiple performance considerations simultaneously.

Deploy connectivity for flexibility: Hybrid network connectivity empowers organizations to maximize the strengths of diverse environments, balancing performance, cost, and provisioning timelines. Your connectivity choice—whether internet-based, dedicated, or partner-hosted connections—directly impacts deployment timeframes, which can range from hours to months depending on on-premises locations and existing network infrastructure. When planning your hybrid architecture, consider how provisioning constraints and evolving performance needs might affect your ability to scale connectivity. Start with your immediate requirements, but design for future growth, recognizing that initial connectivity decisions will shape your options for network expansion.

Deploy secure connectivity: Hybrid networks require robust security measures to protect sensitive data across diverse environments. Your connectivity strategy must align with security requirements and policies, whether you need internet-based or private network connections, and whether encryption in transit is mandatory. Segregating network segments is essential to contain potential security breaches by limiting the impact of compromised resources. Security posture is improved through isolation and granular security controls across different environments. By implementing these secure connectivity strategies, you can establish protected communication channels of your hybrid connectivity while maintaining compliance with your security policies.

Deploy resilient connectivity: Resiliency must be determined based off of business outcomes and will determine architecture decisions. Network reliability, measured through availability and resiliency, requires tailoring your connectivity design to specific SLAs. This involves deploying redundant components to eliminate single points of failure, designing appropriate failover time, applying traffic engineering across connections, and provisioning sufficient capacity. The required reliability level varies by workload criticality, with critical applications possibly warranting maximum resiliency across multiple locations, while less critical workloads may only need single-site redundancy. Since increasing reliability increases costs, evaluate your business requirements to find the right balance.

Optimize cost: Hybrid networks can optimize resource utilization by leveraging the most cost-effective environment for specific workloads. Understanding the cost components of hybrid networking is essential for effective optimization. The cost structure of hybrid networking includes provisioned resources cost representing the cost of maintaining hybrid connectivity infrastructure, usage cost covers data transfer and processing between environments, and connectivity cost from service providers to connect your network location to network points of presence. Effective cost optimization in hybrid networks requires a balance between performance, reliability, and capacity. By implementing targeted cost optimization strategies, you can create a more efficient hybrid network architecture that aligns with your business and technical requirements while minimizing wasted expenditure.