At a higher level, public and private clouds are no longer physical 'locations' to connect. For example, many cloud vendors now offer public cloud services that run in their customer's on-premises data centers. Private clouds, once run exclusively on-premises, are now often hosted in off-premises data centers on virtual private networks (VPNs) or . Private clouds are also hosted on dedicated infrastructure rented from third-party providers., Initially, hybrid cloud architecture was designed to convert parts of a company's on-premises data center into private cloud infrastructure, streamlining resource allocation and scalability. It also focused on connecting that infrastructure to public cloud environments hosted off-premises by a public cloud provider., Hybrid cloud is an IT environment that combines the private cloud, or on-premises infrastructure, with public cloud services. This setup gives organizations the flexibility to choose where to store or run their applications, allowing them to benefit from the security of the private cloud and the scalability of the public cloud..