Companies are now focusing on building technology and improving their IT infrastructure to reduce the cost associated with maintaining it. This has also led to an innovation boom in startups and small businesses. As the industry statistics highlight, cloud computing was valued at USD 587.78 billion in 2023. According to the forecast, the market will grow from USD 676.29 billion in 2024 to USD 2,291.59 billion by 2032, exhibiting a CAGR of 16.5%. 

This shows a significant divergence of businesses towards technology. However, to get the most out of it, you must understand the right strategy to adopt with your cloud architecture. Here, selecting the strategies from the multi-cloud and hybrid cloud comes in. 

A multi-cloud strategy allows businesses to select the cloud services and technologies that best fit their needs, boosting operations, cutting costs, and increasing productivity. On the other hand, hybrid cloud solutions are a viable option for businesses handling extremely confidential and sensitive data. In this blog, let us explore multi-cloud and hybrid cloud in detail.

Multi-Cloud Vs. Hybrid Cloud

The multi-cloud strategy leverages services from multiple cloud providers, like Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and others. Businesses occasionally use Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for a variety of processes, leaving infrastructure management and hosting tasks to IaaS (Infratructure-as-a-service) in public clouds.

For instance, an IT service provider can use a multi-cloud approach by installing Google Cloud for websites, AWS for application development and testing, and Microsoft Azure for databases. The benefits will be no vendor lock-in, maximum budget utilization, and obtaining all available features from each source.

A hybrid cloud is a computing architecture that combines two or more distinct clouds, one of which can be a private cloud solution and the other a public cloud solution.

Implementing a hybrid cloud allows them to migrate sensitive data to private clouds and other applications to public clouds accessible to any employee at any location. The benefits include flexibility, security and availability for employees to gain secure access to corporate resources.

Key Differences Between Multi-cloud and Hybrid Cloud

The table below describes the key differences between the multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. 

Why You Should Get a Multi-cloud Strategy?

Businesses are starting to recognize the value of multi-cloud strategies for a number of reasons. The following are some advantages of a multi-cloud strategy:

• Cloud modernization: Upon obtaining multi-cloud, you also become eligible for an extensive range of tools and services such as servers, storage, microservices, APIs, etc., which enable you to develop cutting-edge apps and maintain an advantage over your competitors.
• Maintaining flexibility and scalability: You may easily prevent vendor lock-in and finish the cloud service contract within your budget by leveraging a variety of cloud services. One other benefit is that you may easily scale up or down in response to your evolving needs at any moment.
• Sharing best practices: Cloud best practices differ, and working with each one teaches you a lot that you may apply to other clouds (private or public). These methods concentrate on raising overall productivity and efficiency in resource use.
• Maintaining the necessary compliance: Using a multi-cloud strategy gives you the flexibility to select service providers who take compliance seriously and store your data where it is required to adhere to local regulations.

Example of Implementing a Multi-Cloud Architecture

A company can use a multi-cloud strategy to manage its vast scale, surges during peak seasons, and diverse demands. A multi-cloud strategy deliberately assigns workloads according to the capabilities of cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and maybe GCP. 

With its strong security, AWS manages core operations; Azure helps with peak season traffic management through auto-scaling; and GCP (perhaps) allows for speedier global development with geographically dispersed data centers. This multi-cloud strategy helps change scalability, reduce costs, access the finest cloud services, expand globally, and boost agility.

Why You Should Get a Hybrid Cloud Strategy?

Here are the benefits associated with switching to a hybrid cloud architecture: 

• Information Security: The public cloud has drawn considerable interest because of its many features, which include business data security, backup, and recovery.

Businesses can rely on managed service providers for backup, snapshots, and disaster recovery, as well as for assistance with compliance and laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI. Switching from tape backup to cloud backup shortens data restoration times and improves RPO/RTO from days or hours to seconds.

• Enterprise flexibility: These days, the IT sector is more likely to “do more with less.” A hybrid cloud approach may help with this by boosting user experiences for mobile apps, facilitating application development prototyping, and increasing agility.
• The ability to scale: The hybrid cloud meets everybody’s constant needs, including media exposure, new product launches, and Christmas shopping. It’s a great option since it does away with the need to purchase resource forecasts by using scalable resources in the public cloud.
• Duration to Market: Traditional cloud procurement cycles typically take weeks and months to complete, delaying new business efforts. Line of Business (LOB) and IT teams may accelerate time to market by using a hybrid cloud to swiftly build new infrastructure and meet development, testing, or deployment requirements

Example of Implementing Hybrid Cloud Strategy

A hybrid cloud strategy is a combination of public and private clouds, so this enables organizations to tap into the flexibility to decide the best deployment mode for specific processes. For instance, if one application requires more computing power than the other, and the on-premise data centers have more resources available than the cloud side, then the company has the total freedom to shift its operations from the in-house data center to the cloud or vice versa. 

Multi-cloud or Hybrid Cloud: Which is Best for Me?

Careful attention must be paid to choosing the best cloud model—hybrid or multi-cloud. It’s crucial to evaluate your company’s requirements before searching for a cloud service provider. Businesses that cannot afford to compromise on security should prioritize obtaining a private cloud, while those with low maintenance needs can choose one public cloud provider.

Multi-cloud lets you choose the most economical option but has its own restrictions ( for example: it may restrict where you can run your apps). A hybrid cloud gives flexibility but may be more expensive.

Lastly, businesses should choose a cloud strategy that expands readily without breaking the bank, taking future expansion into account in addition to cloud sustainability. Also, consider utilizing AI to boost your cloud computing efficiency and improve operations. 

If you are looking to expand your team, like hiring a prompt engineer or cloud consultant, we may help you close the remote vacancy within 2-3 days. Send in your requirements today to hire from a pool of qualified, pre-vetted IT professionals. 

FAQs

• When to choose a multi-cloud strategy? 

A multi-cloud strategy is best in cases when you want to avoid vendor lock-ins, improve performance (by distributing the workload among different clouds), enhance resilience, reduce costs, and introduce flexibility. 

• When to choose a hybrid cloud model?

A hybrid cloud is recommended if organizations want more security and control over their data and a cost-effective way to scale their operations to meet the increasing demand for services. 

• What is the benefit of integrating AI into a hybrid cloud?

The integration of AI and ML models into a hybrid cloud model would improve predictive analytics, data management, and security. This trend could lead to the development of intelligent and self-managing hybrid cloud applications and systems.