We can categorize the use cases broadly into three, based on the existence of different tiers of applications in the clouds, and also the different applications in an enterprise:
- Isolated use cases
- Distributed use cases
- Coexisting use cases
- Supporting application use cases
This is one of the simplest use cases. In this, an enterprise runs some applications in a public cloud and others in a private cloud, the applications don't communicate among themselves regularly, but may transfer data using a batch process.
It might also be the case that one application uses the services of the other - with the communication over an API.
A good use case in this category would be development in public/production on a private cloud (or vice versa).
In the following diagram, the left side is the public cloud and the right side is the private cloud. The applications running on both sides are isolated - which means a nominal delay in the communication path is acceptable...