Multi-Cloud vs Hybrid Cloud: How to Make Informed Cloud Choices

Enterprise cloud and infrastructure needs are diverse and frequently evolve. They require careful technical planning and a sound strategy. For instance, if your primary cloud service provider (CSP) doesn’t have a data center in a country you need to accommodate for data residency requirements, you need the agility to add an on-premise factor or an additional cloud provider to your cloud landscape. Hybrid and multi-cloud approaches can give you this flexibility and agility to respond to changing needs and business aspirations, of which regional requirements are just one of many factors.

Today, 89% of companies have adopted hybrid or multi-cloud strategies. What are hybrid and multi-cloud exactly? Continue reading to find out.

Back to the Basics: Cloud Deployment Models

To understand hybrid and multi-cloud, we must first differentiate between private and public clouds. The key difference is who owns, uses, operates, and manages the physical infrastructure.

What is a Public Cloud?

Public cloud provides a range of infrastructure resources and services over a network connection. The underlying infrastructure is owned and operated by a cloud service provider. Public cloud uses virtualization and abstractions to create logically separate environments, but essentially, multiple customers share the same underlying physical infrastructure and resources. This multi-tenancy is another major difference between public and private clouds.

What is a Private Cloud?

Private cloud is privately hosted by or for a single organization. The infrastructure operates on the same cloud-native principles and technologies that power the public cloud, minus the multi-tenancy. It can be on-premises or in a colocation facility, managed or self-managed. However, it’s dedicated to a single tenant who owns and controls it.

Both hybrid and multi-cloud deployments involve more than one cloud — the difference lies in the “type” of environments they involve.

What is a Hybrid Cloud?

A hybrid cloud “integrates” public and private cloud environments. The main requirement is having both privately owned infrastructure and at least one public cloud.

For example, an organization hosts sensitive data and workloads using that on-premise while non-sensitive applications run on a public cloud, such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.

What is a Multi-cloud?

A multi-cloud simply “combines” more than one public cloud. An organization that uses infrastructure or services from two or more CSPs, even if there is no connection between them, is a multi-cloud company.

For example, an organization uses AWS for hosting its main application infrastructure but uses GCP for AI and data analytics workloads, in particular.

What’s a Hybrid Multi-cloud?

The lines between a hybrid and multi-cloud blur in modern organizations where there are multiple private and public cloud environments operating simultaneously. A hybrid cloud becomes a hybrid multi-cloud when there are multiple public clouds in addition to at least one private cloud environment. However, a multi-cloud cannot also be a hybrid cloud, since it only has one type of cloud — public cloud.

Now that you know the basic difference between each cloud deployment model, we can explore and compare hybrid and multi-cloud in detail.  

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Multi-cloud and Hybrid Cloud Comparison

Composition

This is the primary distinction, as discussed above. A hybrid cloud has to have both private and public elements. The private element can even be legacy infrastructure as long as it integrates with your cloud environments.

A multi-cloud needs at least two public clouds. It does not require any on-premise or private component.

Integration

The private and public environments in a hybrid cloud must be tightly integrated—it’s a key requirement. Having private and public clouds that operate in silos does not constitute a hybrid cloud. All environments must be able to operate as a cohesive unit. As such, you need connectivity and a unified orchestration layer to allow seamless deployment, secure data exchange, and consistent identity management and policy enforcement across both private and public clouds.

This level of integration is not a requirement in multi-cloud setups. It’s about organizations simply using more than one cloud provider, even if each is for entirely different use cases and applications with no need for cross-cloud communication and integration. However, you may still need cross-cloud connectivity and integration for certain use cases and to fully benefit from your multi-cloud deployment.

Common Motivations

• Digital Transformation and Cloud Adoption: Hybrid cloud is often a natural first step for cloud adoption among organizations that already have a strong on-prem foothold. It allows them to keep legacy or specialized workloads on-premise, if they are too expensive or complicated to migrate, while still benefiting from the operational and cost efficiencies of the cloud.

• Data Sovereignty and Compliance: Many organizations adopt hybrid cloud to keep sensitive and regulated internal customer data within their own data centers. Hybrid cloud allows them to retain data sovereignty and control, particularly in highly regulated industries.

Certain industries and types of data are subject to slightly less stringent data residency rules that allow companies to store data off-premises, but it must still remain within specific geographic regions. A multi-cloud strategy facilitates this—you can expand your cloud presence into regions where your primary provider doesn’t operate, without the upfront costs and deep integrations of a hybrid cloud.

• Cost Optimization: Generally, hybrid cloud is considered more expensive than public/multi cloud because of the upfront and maintenance costs of an on-premise datacenter. However, certain compute-intensive, predictable workloads are more cost-effective to run on dedicated infrastructure, compared to the per-hour pricing of public cloud. With hybrid cloud’s cloud bursting option, organizations can also eliminate capital expenditures needed to retain a surplus capacity for unexpected or short-term demand spikes.They can scale workloads to the public cloud during peak demand and back to on-prem once the hike is over.

Multi-cloud also allows organizations to optimize their cloud costs by hosting workloads and applications in optimal cloud environments. For example, we highlighted in our cloud pricing comparison that AWS offers the smallest compute instance, t3.nano (2 vCPUs, 0.5 GB RAM), at $0.0052 per hour, which is the cheapest among hyperscalers. However, for a 2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM instance, Oracle offers the most competitive rate at $0.038 per hour. With multi-cloud, you can choose the lowest pricing options for different compute needs.

• Accelerating Innovation: Data privacy and governance are key challenges in enterprise AI adoption. With a hybrid cloud strategy, organizations can keep their sensitive training data on-prem and preprocess and tokenize it before sending it to the cloud for model training.

At the same time, a multi-cloud can help you take advantage of the best pricing, availability, data locality, and performance for AI tasks across different cloud providers.

• Latency Constraints and Performance: Hybrid cloud is the obvious choice for mission-critical and ultra-latency-sensitive workloads, such as IoT-enabled manufacturing systems, where even slight disruptions in connectivity can become disastrous. It allows you to host such workloads on-premise or at the edge, close to where end-users or IoT devices are.

Multi-cloud’s latency benefits are not a match for those of hybrid cloud. However, multi-cloud still offers greater performance optimization opportunities compared to a single public cloud, as organizations can choose cloud providers with data centers and edge locations closest to their end users.

• Organic Adoption: While some companies adopt hybrid or multi-cloud models strategically, for most organizations, this happens rather organically. You can end up with disparate environments due to business events like mergers and acquisitions or because of shadow IT practices, where certain employees or teams may be using cloud environments or services without IT’s knowledge and approval. So, whether hybrid and multi-cloud are on your cloud agenda or not, it's a better idea to be strategically prepared for them anyway.

Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Concerns

Despite widespread adoption and the many benefits, hybrid and multi-cloud environments are certainly more complex compared to managing a single on-premise data center or cloud provider. Hybrid and multi-cloud companies have four key concerns or challenges that we often hear about:

1. Cross-platform Consistency: Individual public cloud platforms are not fully standardized, which means configurations and policies within each can vary, creating deployment headaches and consistency challenges for development and operations teams. They need to be proficient in all platforms within your cloud mix to be able to connect workloads, data and applications across clouds.
   
   
2. Automation and Orchestration: To fully realize the efficiency and optimizations of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, workloads should be able to migrate from one environment to another based on real-time cost and performance insights. However, this requires continuous placement assessment and multi-cloud orchestration capabilities.
   
3. Tool Sprawl: Each cloud provider offers its own set of tools and solutions to simplify cloud operations. As you add more cloud environments to your portfolio, your tech stack also becomes increasingly diverse and complex. Ideally, you want to be able to use these vendor-specific tools as needed but also have a centralized control plane on top for maintaining single pane-of-glass visibility and management.
4. Monitoring and Governance: Managing hybrid and multi-cloud requires centralized tracking of resource consumption and service utilization across your entire hybrid and/or multi-cloud deployment. You need to be able to treat it as a single unit to avoid visibility loopholes, security incidents, governance inconsistencies, or compliance gaps.

How to enable Hybrid and Multi-cloud Environments

Enabling hybrid and multi-cloud is all about having a well-planned strategy and the right technology stack. You need to identify business drivers for hybrid and multi-cloud, which will help you determine the best cloud mix—hybrid, multi-cloud, hybrid multi-cloud—for your organization. Next, you’ll need to choose your tech stack to enable secure networking and unified operations across all dimensions of your cloud landscape.

There are several options you can choose from. Major cloud providers offer proprietary solutions and platforms for orchestrating hybrid and multi-cloud environments. These include AWS Outposts, Azure Arc, Anthos, and more. While hyperscalers provide feature-rich options, they are mostly centered around their own environments and proprietary integrations, designed to promote and keep you primarily within their ecosystems.

Some organizations prefer to build their own cloud management frameworks to maintain greater control and flexibility. They use standardized and open-source technologies like Kubernetes, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), and observability frameworks. Deploying internal solutions is resource-intensive. Alternatively, you can use emma cloud management platform, which provides comprehensive capabilities for deploying, connecting, monitoring, and optimizing all infrastructure environments consistently. It’s purpose-built to help you handle hybrid and multi-cloud environments centrally and optimally, with minimal dedicated expertise.

Streamline your hybrid and multi-cloud deployments today with a 14-day trial of the emma platform, complete with dedicated support!