Hybrid Cloud & Multi-Cloud

Much has been said about these terms - Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud. But are enterprises clear about what to deploy and when? Sometimes companies end up with either choices or both by accident. Company A always stayed with on premise "private cloud" for security and control, then it acquired company B which uses multi-cloud. Then the scramble begins on how to manage both.

Let us clear the fog.

Hybrid Cloud - combination of both private and public cloud services. Private cloud is sometimes called internal or corporate cloud and is typically implemented on premise. This choice allows the security and control of a private cloud while giving scalability and cost efficiency of public cloud services.

Multi-Cloud - deployment of multiple public cloud services from different providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure & Google GCP, reducing vendor lock-in and increasing resilience.

What are some of the benefits of these choices?

• Flexibility (Hybrid) - Workload placement: move workloads to the most suitable environment based on application capability, performance and cost requirements
• Cost Optimization (Hybrid) - Place workloads where the best price to performance ratio can be achieved (eg. Peak/burstable workloads in private cloud when needed)
• Improved Security and Compliance Posture (Hybrid) - Allow sensitive data to remain on premise and allow less sensitive data to be stored in the public cloud. Reduce risk of data breaches and cyber attacks, potentially improving compliance with data privacy regulations.
• Vendor lock-in avoidance (Multi-Cloud) - Reduce concentration risk and lock-in to a single provider's services and pricing structures. Helps promote competition between cloud providers, drive lower prices and improved service quality.
• Improved Resilience (Hybrid & Multi-Cloud) - Protect against outages in the event of a disruption or provider failure by distributing workloads across multiple clouds and providers for high-availability.
• Data Sovereignty (Hybrid & Multi-Cloud) - Keeping data within jurisdiction can be a challenge without a presence (data center) within the target jurisdiction. Leveraging a hyperscaler environment in the region in hybrid mode may offer a solution.

However, these options are not without challenges: integration and compatibility, cost and complexity, security, standards compliance cost, and portability and parity issues. Now there are so many services offered by public cloud providers like AWS and Azure (both claim over 200 products and services), the customer can get easily confused.

A careful evaluation of which option is the best choice must be made keeping in mind the risks and challenges.