Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud

How does cloud computing work?

Instead of being housed in the same location as the people they are serving, cloud computing hosts programs and data on remote servers spread across many data centres. Every individual cloud service or group of services from each vendor can simply be referred to as “cloud” when addressing multi-cloud and hybrid clouds.

What is the difference between a public cloud and a private cloud?

A public cloud is a cloud service that multiple customers use, although they don’t interact with each other, just as many customers can use one bank without drawing on each other’s funds.

A private cloud is a cloud service for only one customer. An organization can either build and maintain a private cloud themselves, or they can pay an external vendor to host a private cloud for them.

Multi-Cloud Environment

The term “multi-cloud” describes the blending and integrating of various public clouds. A company may use one public cloud as a database, another as PaaS, another for user authentication, and so forth.

A private cloud or on-premises data centre may also be a part of a multi-cloud deployment, making the cloud deployment technically a hybrid one.

Hybrid Cloud Computing

A hybrid cloud mixes on-premises or private cloud computing with public cloud computing. Any IT infrastructure that functions inside a company network qualifies as on-premise infrastructure, including internal data centres.

Deployments of hybrid clouds are pretty typical. Some firms transfer partially to the cloud but decide against going completely because it would be too expensive or resource-intensive. As a result, some business operations, business logic, and data storage are still handled by traditional on-premise infrastructure.

Businesses may also elect to use a hybrid cloud strategy to benefit from the larger resources and lower overhead of public cloud computing while keeping some processes and data in a more regulated environment (such as a private cloud or on-premise data centre).

Two major differences are as follows:

• Private clouds are a necessary component of hybrid clouds, which are normally handled as a single entity.
• Multiple public cloud services are always present in multi-clouds, and these services frequently serve distinct purposes. Although they are not required to, multi-clouds can include a private cloud component, in which case they can function as both a multi-cloud and a hybrid cloud.

Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud: Architectural differences

• The location of non-cloud resources is the primary distinction between hybrid and multi-cloud architecture. In a multi-cloud (not hybrid) environment, those resources are also in the cloud, either at the same provider providing compute services or at another provider or colocation facility. Hybrid clouds make use of existing on-premises servers, storage, and networking to support ancillary services like authentication, VDI, security, databases, and monitoring.
• Although by bending the definition any hybrid cloud can be categorised as a multi-cloud, hybrid is defined as both private and public clouds used in tandem, so not every multi-cloud is a hybrid cloud. Regarding multi-clouds, there is no need to worry about on-premises private cloud infrastructure; instead, you should focus on each public cloud service individually, as well as techniques to make orchestration and monitoring across them simpler. To cut down on training, streamline operations, and lower the possibility of human mistakes in multi-cloud, administrators should concentrate on a single tool that functions across many clouds.
• Since multi-cloud lacks a private cloud, organisations must take care to ensure that the location of data storage complies with stringent requirements such as PCI, HIPAA, and GDPR. Since even maintaining copies or backups of this data outside of the location it is supposed to reside in can cause problems, care must be taken when designing a data strategy for the multi-cloud. Most of the hyperscale cloud providers offer availability zones and regions to help ensure this.

Can a hybrid cloud also be multi-cloud?

A hybrid cloud deployment may also be referred to as a multi-cloud deployment if it uses several public clouds. Due to this, despite the fact that they truly mean slightly different things, the terms are occasionally used synonymously.