What Cloud Computing Strategy should you choose – Hybrid Cloud vs. Multi-Cloud?

Despite the prominent difference between hybrid and multi-cloud, people are unclear about the terms. A hybrid cloud is a model that extends the infrastructure of the private cloud by adding an existing public cloud. On the other hand, a multi-cloud is an environment that includes multiple clouds with different types simultaneously. Therefore, hybrid-cloud is specific, whereas the other cloud computing strategy is generic and reflects reality in a better way.

You can implement both of these architectures with a simple process. However, the workload arrangement will be different in the environment. Still, confused? Let’s understand both of these terms in detail:

Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud will combine public cloud computing with on-premises or private infrastructure. In a corporate network, the internal data center will be the on-site infrastructure and its function in a corporate network.

Hybrid cloud deployments are common among businesses. If you find a hybrid cloud to be resource-intensive and costly, you have a choice to migrate partially. Therefore, some business logic, processes, and data storage are still in the previous on-premises infrastructure.

You can also adopt various hybrid cloud strategies to gain control over some data and processes. For instance, you can utilize an on-premises data center or a private cloud. Furthermore, it enables you to lower the cost and achieve valuable cloud computing resources.

Multi-Cloud

The multi-Cloud strategy includes a combination of multiple public clouds. You have a choice to add more than one cloud. For instance, you get more benefits by integrating a PaaS cloud, one public cloud, and a user authentication cloud. You can consider a cloud deployment as a hybrid cloud if it contains a private cloud.

Hybrid Cloud vs. Multi-Cloud

You can differentiate between both clouds by considering the location of the resources. Hybrid cloud includes existing storage, servers, and networking. All these components support secondary services like VDI, databases, authentication, monitoring, and security. Contrarily to that, multiple cloud environments will include other resources as well.

You can classify every hybrid cloud as a multi-cloud by expanding the definition. But, not all of these multiple clouds are hybrid because a hybrid includes both public and private clouds. The multi-cloud has nothing to do with the personal cloud infrastructure. This makes it different from a hybrid cloud. It only focuses on separate public cloud services. Also, it provides solutions to monitor and simplify the orchestration. With multi-cloud, you can work across multiple cloud infrastructures by using one tool to simplify operations, reduce the training time, and prevent chances of human error.

Conclusion

Both the concepts of these cloud computing strategies seem similar, but they are completely different. The choice between both of these cloud computing strategies depends on the infrastructure you want. The multi-cloud approach will address the challenges related to more than one cloud concurrently. However, the focus of hybrid clouds mainly relies on offloading the private clouds. Infrastructure setup is not the biggest challenge in multi-cloud computing. However, workload orchestration is a major problem.