Hybrid Computing Explained: Benefits, Examples, and Key Trends

What is hybrid computing, and why has it earned a spot at #7 on Gartner’s list of the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2025?

As businesses look for more flexibility, resilience, and the ability to grow, hybrid computing has become an important way to combine the benefits of on-premises systems with the adaptability of public and private clouds.

In this article, we’ll explore the core concepts of hybrid computing — its potential benefits and risks — and how it extends, complements, and enhances already successful enterprise computing strategies.

What is hybrid computing?

According to Gartner, hybrid computing is “the orchestration of emerging compute, storage and network mechanisms to support disruptive business use cases that have bigger impacts beyond the enterprise. IT leaders can increase the value of emerging computing mechanisms by combining them, maximizing their strengths.”

When discussing hybrid computing, let’s define the word mechanism as any technical or operational method that is used to deliver an IT service, including devices, storage, networking equipment, software, applications, and services.

Hybrid computing brings together IT mechanisms from different compute environments and architectures to leverage the strengths of each environment by:

• Increasing scalability and flexibility.
• Improving cost, resource use, and efficiency.
• Maintaining regulatory compliance.
• Accelerating innovation.

Hybrid computing uses a mix of environments — like on-premises systems and private, public, or hybrid clouds — to solve problems that can't be solved in just one environment.

Types of IT mechanisms used in hybrid computing

Most of the compute, storage, and network mechanisms used for hybrid computing are the same mechanisms used in other on-premises or cloud environments, including:

In terms of the tools and systems used to deliver IT services, hybrid computing environments are no different from on-premises, cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud environments.

The main difference is in how hybrid computing connects, scales, and manages these resources, making sure the right tools are always used to meet business needs — wherever those tools are located.

Examples of hybrid computing

Let’s look at an example of where a hybrid computing approach (leveraging different mechanisms in different environments for scalability, efficiency, optimization, cost, etc.) can and should be used.

Imagine a retailer who sells its products worldwide. It has corporate and brick-and-mortar locations in the United States, Europe, and Asia, as well as fulfilment warehouses located around the world. This retailer might use a hybrid computing setup like this:

1. Public cloud: The retailer stages redundant copies of its Web site and services in different Amazon Web Service (AWS) regions and availability zones, to more efficiently service customers in different geographic areas or to provide high-availability services in case of a network outage.
2. Public cloud: Providing overflow and on-demand capacity for web sites and web services (APIs) during peak demand events, such as holiday shopping or major promotional initiatives.
3. On-premises data centers (DCs): Data centers located in each corporate location for running order fulfilment, financial, and other corporate applications, using legacy and modern systems.
4. Private cloud: Securely stores and isolates credit card data away from all other organizational systems and personnel, according to Payment Card Industry/Data Security Standard (PCI/DSS) requirements.
5. Edge computing system: In-store devices to provide real-time reporting, price adjustments, and local analytics.
6. Artificial Intelligence processing: AI services to conduct fraud detection, analyze customer behavior, understand product demand trends, and more.

Many of these tools aren’t new but using them together in a hybrid computing environment (rather than only on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid cloud) opens new possibilities.

Hybrid computing mechanisms can also be located with different cloud providers to avoid the danger of vendor lock-in (putting all your IT mechanisms in one vendor basket).

Benefits of hybrid computing

Hybrid computing provides many benefits to organizations of all sizes, including:

• Cloud bursting/scalability: For companies that experience rapid spikes in resource demand (e.g., gambling sites during the NCAA playoffs, e-commerce apps during the holidays, products going viral, etc.), a hybrid computing environment can provide cloud bursting, where visitors can be redirected or load-balanced to additional external servers.
• Disaster recovery (DR), business continuity (BC), and high-availability (HA): Instead of contracting out DR/BC/HA functions to a single contractor, which may tie you down to one location, you can now stage many of these critical functions using as-a-service offerings (DR-as-a-service, HA-as-a-service, BC-as-a-service).
• Flexibility and efficiency: Organizations have the flexibility to place applications and workloads closer to their users, decreasing response time and reducing network outage risks.
• Optimizing cost: Organizations can strategically place workloads to balance the costs of private clouds versus pay-as-you-go cloud storage, service charges, subscriptions, and other costs.
• Regulatory compliance: Highly regulated data, such as financial institutional information, can be stored in secured private clouds, while non-regulated and low-sensitivity data can be stored in less-regulated systems.
• Security: Hybrid computing allows organizations to strategically determine where to place data storage and workloads according to security concerns.

Limitations of hybrid computing

There are also several limitations to using hybrid computing, including:

• Compliance issues: Organizations must navigate different security standards provided by different cloud providers. Different configurations and security tooling may lead to security gaps, which can endanger compliance, service level agreements (SLAs), and cyber protection.
• Complexity and integration challenges: Hosting IT mechanisms in their optimal environments will lead to increased complexity in configuration, management, connectivity, integration, and specialized administration skills. Hybrid computing environments can be more difficult to manage than traditional on-premises and single-cloud environments.
• Data visibility and observability: Hybrid computing adds an additional layer of complexity and reporting when tracking data flow and data usage in several different environments.
• Higher upfront costs and ongoing costs: Locating IT mechanisms in different data center or cloud environments may result in higher contract costs, monthly subscriptions, leasing, and other ongoing costs. While costs may be optimized for some IT mechanisms, capital and operating costs may also increase as more functionality moves to different environments.
• Increased security vulnerabilities: Hybrid computing environments increase an organization’s attack surface, as more hybrid computing environments mean more targets for bad actors to attack. Cyber security, incident response, and data remediation must be managed on several distinct levels.
• Vendor lock-in: With hybrid computing, it can be more convenient to select one or two vendors for all cloud-based services. This can lead to vendor lock-in, where your organization is dependent on your preferred vendor, it is difficult to switch vendors and integrate with other environments, and your IT service delivery is susceptible to the vendor’s infrastructure.

Why use hybrid computing?

Hybrid computing architecture uses IT mechanisms located in multiple environments to provide IT services that can't be offered in an individual location. As technology gets more complex and IT can no longer stay only on-premises or in a single cloud, organizations need more adaptable infrastructure — like hybrid computing.

Given these pressing needs for a more expansive IT architecture, it makes sense that hybrid computing was ranked #7 on Gartner’s list of the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2025.