Hybrid cloud and hybrid computing are no longer just edge cases—they’re becoming the default for organizations managing complex, distributed infrastructure. As workloads shift across environments, operators are under pressure to maintain performance, control costs, and meet compliance requirements without overbuilding.
According to Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey Results 2025, 55% of IT workloads are now hosted off-premises, with that figure expected to rise to 58% by 2027. At the same time, one in five major outages costs over $1 million, exposing the risks of fragmented or inflexible infrastructure strategies and downtime.
What is hybrid cloud?
Hybrid cloud connects cloud services with private or on-premises infrastructure. Confidential data and information stay private within the owned digital infrastructure, while cloud services—often considered third-party owned infrastructure—handle burst capacity, development, and customer-facing applications.
This approach helps organizations scale, control costs, and meet compliance while using existing infrastructure.
What is hybrid computing?
Hybrid computing combines cloud and on-premises systems into one model, managing storage and processing. For example, real-time analytics are run locally while batch jobs run in the cloud.
This lets IT teams place workloads based on needs: keeping latency-sensitive tasks nearby and sending heavy jobs to scalable cloud resources. The result is better resource use, improved performance, and greater flexibility.
Why does the hybrid approach matter?
Without an aligned and coordinated approach to workload placement, organizations face rising latency, stranded capacity, and compliance gaps. For data center operators and IT teams, the question has shifted from whether to adopt hybrid models to how it can be implemented as operationally suited to their current and future needs.
Combining environments in one strategy increases resilience, lessens resource use, and facilitates flexibility without replacing existing infrastructure. The hybrid approach controls capital and operational costs by avoiding overprovisioning and cuts latency by keeping compute processing close to users.
- Hybrid environments let teams adjust capacity quickly. They can shift workloads between private and cloud infrastructure depending on demand, making it easier to handle peaks without intensive investment.
- Organizations can avoid costly overbuilds by running steady workloads on owned infrastructure and shifting to cloud services when overloads occur and are needed.
- Hybrid cloud helps teams transition and adapt to evolving regional mandates on data privacy and sovereignty as operators are mandated to control and manage, where and how data is stored, accessed, and transferred—especially when cloud service providers (CSPs) operate under foreign jurisdictions.
In practice, workloads can move dynamically between environments based on capacity, speed and connectivity, or compliance requirements, such as running a customer database on-site while offloading analytics to the cloud. For example, a financial services firm might run routine batch calculations on local servers while using cloud GPU clusters for complex risk simulations.
Together, hybrid cloud provides the underlying infrastructure, and hybrid computing orchestrates how workloads leverage it, safeguarding each task runs in the most suitable environment for performance, cost, and security.
Common use cases of hybrid cloud and hybrid computing
Hybrid IT finds practical value in how it addresses real-world challenges across different industries, making it suitable for a range of workloads and operational needs. From modernizing legacy systems to supporting emerging technologies and contributing to business resilience, some examples below identify its use:
- Enterprise IT modernization: Large enterprises often face the challenge of modernizing legacy systems without disrupting core operations. Hybrid cloud allows them to migrate gradually, keeping critical workloads on-prem while shifting less sensitive functions to the cloud. Microsoft’s enterprise clients, for instance, use Azure to connect legacy infrastructure with
- Edge computing and the internet of things (IoT): Industries with distributed operations like manufacturing, retail, and logistics, use hybrid computing to support edge workloads. Processing happens locally to reduce latency and bandwidth usage, while cloud resources handle analytics and orchestration. Vertiv has supported deployments where edge infrastructure is installed in constrained environments, such as retail back rooms or industrial control rooms, enabling real-time responsiveness without overloading central systems.
- AI workloads across cloud and on-premises: Organizations running AI workloads often split tasks between environments to balance performance, cost, and data governance. Many enterprises use hybrid computing to orchestrate this infrastructure split for training and inferencing—running high-volume training jobs in the cloud while keeping latency-sensitive or compliance-bound tasks closer to the data source. This setup helps teams manage infrastructure costs without compromising control or performance.
- Disaster recovery and business continuity: Hybrid cloud architectures support failover strategies that span both cloud and on-prem environments. Workloads are replicated across zones or regions, reducing the risk of downtime during outages. Google Cloud’s customers, for example, use This setup is especially useful for applications that require high availability but can’t tolerate long recovery windows.
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Hybrid infrastructure lets operators align workloads with the right environment, extending existing assets rather than replacing them, giving data centers the flexibility to handle shifting demand, AI-scale workloads, and resilience needs. As compute intensity rises and regulatory pressures grow, hybrid strategies will guide how operators design, implement, and manage infrastructure. The question now rests on how quickly operators can adapt their environments to take full advantage of the benefits.
Explore how Vertiv can help you design and operate hybrid infrastructure that balances cost, compliance, and performance. Discover Vertiv’s global solutions and start building a more flexible and resilient data center today.
