With cloud becoming the buzzword of the IT industry, a number of strategies are being introduced to help businesses make the most of it. Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are two cloud architectures that offer flexibility to avail benefits of cloud computing.
A multi-cloud architecture, as the name suggests, involves multiple cloud platforms and so does a hybrid cloud. However, both cloud computing architectures have key differences, which we are going to discuss in the segment below.
Hybrid Cloud vs Multi-Cloud: A General Overview
Any enterprise, no matter at what scale it operates cannot move to a public cloud architecture in one go. Even when migrating from on-premise infrastructure to cloud, the resources, systems, workload capabilities won’t be migrated completely to a public cloud. Some of the resources still remain at the private data centers and such interoperability is a perfect example of a hybrid cloud.
Hybrid cloud also provides organizations with the flexibility to avoid vendor lock-in by deploying the workload to both private and public cloud environments. Here, there can be more than one or more public clouds involved but together with the private data centers, they all are a single entity.
A hybrid cloud is a single entity that combines private and public clouds. This environment can combine a private data center with public cloud services such as SaaS, LaaS, PaaS, or any other as-as-service environment.
A multi-cloud on the other end involves a mix and match of various cloud services, from different providers in order to meet specific workload needs. These services are not connected to each other. For example, a multi-cloud platform can have services from different cloud providers and for specific functionalities.
For enterprises that use cloud services across multiple geographies, having one public cloud infra provider to meet all its needs is a certainly a struggle. In such organizations, a multi-cloud architecture is a must-have. Along with this, selecting the most efficient and cost-effective services from each cloud infra provider means your business gets the best from all the worlds.
A lot many times, the terms hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are used interchangeably. But multi-cloud computing is a subset of the broader term hybrid cloud computing.- Gartner
Hybrid or Multi-Cloud: What does your Business Need?
Both, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud have their own set of benefits to offer. But, which one to opt for a software solution completely depends upon the requirement that a business has. This requires the as-is analysis of a business and then understand the benefits that both the cloud architectures can offer.
If you’re migrating to cloud and need technical help to migrate from on-premise to cloud, then connect with our cloud experts to understand how to make it possible with minimum downtime.