The hybrid cloud is the combination of a public cloud provider (such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Joyent Compute) with a private cloud platform — one that's designed for use by a single organization. The public and private cloud infrastructures, which operate independently of each other, communicate over an encrypted connection, using technology that allows for the portability of data and applications.

The precision of this definition is quite important: The public and private clouds in a hybrid cloud arrangement are distinct and independent elements. This allows organizations to store protected or privileged data on a private cloud, while retaining the ability to leverage computational resources from the public cloud to run applications that rely on this data. This keeps data exposure to a bare minimum because they're not storing sensitive data long-term on the public cloud component.

It's important to understand that the concept of a hybrid cloud is not simply connecting any arbitrary server to a public cloud provider and calling it hybrid. The private infrastructure must run some type of cloud services, such as NemakiWare, an open-source enterprise content management (ECM) software stack based on the interoperable CMIS standard, or Joyent SmartDataCenter, a cloud management platform for private and hybrid cloud deployments.

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