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Blog Summary:
This blog is a handy guide for business leaders looking to introduce cloud strategy in their organizations. It will help them understand which strategy works best for their business, between multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud. They will be able to weigh similarities & differences and make the right decision.
Table of Content
Rolls Royce, the global automobile leader, built a cloud-based HR system in 2015. In 2018, the city of Barcelona created a smart-city strategy enabling central cloud management of transportation, traffic, water, and energy.
Accelerating cloud initiatives doesn’t only help organizations; it impacts cities, too. Here’s how:
However, choosing the right cloud computing strategy between multi cloud vs. hybrid cloud is a tough battle for organizations. 42.5% of EU organizations invested in cloud computing in 2023 for emails, office software, and file storage, as reported by Eurostat.
Today, in 2024, the hybrid cloud market is USD 129.68 billion and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 22.12% until 2029, as predicted by Mordor Intelligence.
This guide will help you decide between multiple cloud providers and a hybrid cloud environment.
Multi-cloud refers to the strategy of using multiple cloud computing platforms simultaneously to meet diverse business needs. This approach allows organizations to avoid vendor lock-in, enhance resilience, and optimize costs by leveraging the unique capabilities of different cloud providers.
With multi-cloud, businesses can distribute workloads across various cloud environments, ensuring flexibility, scalability, and redundancy in their IT infrastructure. Let’s understand its cloud-native architecture in detail through the following sections:
A great example of Multi-cloud is Netflix, a video streaming service platform that delivers videos to millions of customers through a single vendor, Amazon Web Services (AWS).
However, it switched to multi-cloud by implementing Google Cloud services along with AWS for disaster recovery and Artificial Intelligence. Choosing two vendors instead of one allows Netflix to achieve maximum flexibility by integrating the best services for each workload.
A multinational corporation operates its business-critical applications across multiple geographic regions. To ensure high availability, cloud application security, and disaster recovery, they are deployed to different cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
By leveraging multi-cloud architecture, they mitigate the risk of service outages caused by provider-specific issues or regional disruptions. Additionally, they can optimize performance by selecting the cloud provider closest to their users in each region, ensuring low latency and optimal user experience.
Multi-cloud development architecture offers several benefits to organizations.
Firstly, it enhances resilience and mitigates the risk of downtime by spreading workloads across multiple cloud providers. This minimizes the impact of potential service outages or disruptions from a single provider.
Secondly, multi-cloud strategies enable organizations to avoid vendor lock-in, giving them the flexibility to choose the best services and negotiate competitive pricing from different providers.
Thirdly, it promotes innovation and agility by leveraging the unique capabilities and strengths of enterprise cloud computing.
Fourthly, it enables organizations to save costs, as different cloud development providers offer different pricing models. It also allows them to take advantage of each vendor’s unique cloud application security features, such as S3 Object Locking, Encryption Methods, and Ransomware Data Recovery.
Fifthly, a multi-cloud strategy allows organizations to remain compliant with regulations that vary by region. Each provider has different certifications when distributing workloads and data.
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Get Started with Multi-cloud
A hybrid cloud is an enterprise cloud computing environment that combines on-premises infrastructure (private cloud) with public cloud services. It allows organizations to leverage the scalability and cost-effectiveness of public clouds while retaining sensitive data and applications on-premises or in a private cloud.
Hybrid clouds provide flexibility, allowing workloads to move seamlessly between environments based on business needs. Let’s understand it in detail through the following sections:
Turbonomic, an IBM subsidiary, employs AI to automate workloads in hybrid cloud computing. Its AI ensures real-time optimization of performance, compliance, and resource usage. Using supply-and-demand techniques, Turbonomic maximizes data utilization and migration efficiency in hybrid cloud-native architecture.
Lockheed Martin, Expedia, and JP Morgan are some major brands relying on Turbonomic to optimize their hybrid cloud services infrastructure.
A financial institution can utilize the benefits of a hybrid cloud-native architecture as it is heavily regulated and still depends on legacy systems. Choosing a hybrid cloud deployment solution allows it the flexibility to isolate its highly sensitive data.
Banks can host industry-compliant applications on public clouds and build data storage on-premises in private clouds. Additionally, the hybrid cloud enables financial institutions to adopt the DevOps methodology. With DevOps, they can develop and provide customized software solutions to streamline banking operations.
A hybrid cloud development benefits organizations by combining public and private servers. It stores the most sensitive information on on-site servers and uses public servers to store general business information and backups.
Here are its advantages:
A hybrid cloud is a unified platform that enables businesses to easily adopt agile development, cloud application security, and operations, commonly known as the DevSecOps methodology. It eliminates bottlenecks in all development-related operations, leading to faster market launches.
Businesses can achieve more scalability more quickly with the hybrid cloud’s automatic responses to unexpected traffic spikes. In the event of traffic surges and network outages, it enables them to continue their operations with minimal downtime.
Optimize your hybrid cloud environment for performance and cost-efficiency.
Begin Your Hybrid Cloud Journey
Your organization might have a single cloud strategy and is experiencing issues. In such cases, your goal could be mitigating security risks, avoiding vendor lock-in, and achieving flexibility in choosing different cloud app development services.
On the other hand, suppose your organization has a multi-cloud strategy in place. Then, your goal might be to merge your on-premises IT infrastructure with private and public cloud to create a single cloud environment that fully utilizes both strategies.
In any case, deploying two or more cloud solutions is always better instead of having a single cloud provider. However, it could be a tough decision to choose between a multi-cloud or a hybrid cloud strategy as they both have many similarities.
Data migration is a complex process in both multi-cloud and hybrid clouds, requiring cloud cost optimization strategies. It also requires extensive resource usage, whether you’re migrating to multiple clouds or public clouds of different vendors.
Generally, a migration process always moves the assets upwards to a new or existing cloud and resides there. However, in multi-cloud and hybrid clouds, migration takes place in multiple lanes.
Based on your shifting requirements, the data moves between multiple public and private clouds. This shift in the migration strategy has almost no impact on the migration process. However, it can affect the operations before and after migration.
A robust architecture is essential to protecting the underlying infrastructure, such as Virtual Machines (VMs), from attacks. If attackers compromise the infrastructure, the cloud services and data can become vulnerable quickly.
Hence, both environments establish unified security policies and standards across on-premises and cloud app development platforms.
For this, both environments provide security measures like Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS) and Data Encryption protocols like Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems and Security Operations Centers (SOCs).
Additionally, they both have Identity and Access Management (IAM) for managing user identities, authentication, and permissions.
When companies use multiple cloud services or a mix of cloud and on-premises infrastructure, they need to make sure their data follows certain rules and regulations. These rules are about keeping data safe and private, like PCI for credit card information or HIPAA for medical records.
Public cloud providers, such as big companies offering cloud services, usually have better security measures than smaller companies with their own private clouds.
So, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud both offer storage services for legally suitable data storage in different locations. Organizations can store sensitive data with reliable public cloud providers that provide a controlled, secure, and isolated environment.
Hybrid cloud environments enhance resilience and business continuity by allowing components to take over in case of outages. They diversify data across private and public clouds, reducing the impact of attacks.
Organizations can achieve agility by easily moving data between cloud services as needed. Compared to public clouds, organizations gain more control over security strategy and cost-effectiveness.
Similarly, a multi-cloud security strategy enhances resilience by spreading data across various platforms, reducing the risk of a single point of failure. It mitigates security threats like data breaches, providing flexibility and scalability.
It leverages different cloud services’ capabilities to adapt to changing business needs and improve performance.
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Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are distinct deployment models, each with unique advantages. However, careful consideration of the pros and cons is crucial when selecting a model for workloads or data migration. Stakeholders should understand the differences to choose the best-suited model for their business needs.
Multi-cloud security focuses on protecting data and resources spread across various platforms. It utilizes tools like Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Identity and Access Management (IAM).
In contrast, hybrid cloud security secures data across both cloud and on-premises environments, employing tools like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions.
The benefits of hybrid cloud development services include controlling physical access to private cloud hardware, which is vital for regulated industries. Multi-cloud solutions offer features such as automation and encryption.
However, in hybrid setups, companies are responsible for configuring and managing online access to their private cloud resources.
In multi-cloud environments, data storage involves utilizing multiple cloud development services from different providers simultaneously. Organizations can store data across various cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Tools commonly used include AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage.
In contrast, the hybrid cloud integrates on-premises infrastructure with public cloud services, offering flexibility and scalability. Tools like VMware, vSAN, and Microsoft Azure Stack are utilized.
Data can be stored both on-premises and in the cloud, with tools like Azure Storage Gateway facilitating seamless data movement between environments.
Multi-cloud architecture integrates multiple cloud services for flexibility and redundancy, employing identity management systems for unified access control. Unified logging and cloud monitoring with LMA stacks provide comprehensive oversight, aiding performance optimization and security management.
Common tools include cloud management platforms (CMPs) like RightScale or CloudHealth. Hybrid cloud combines on-premises infrastructure with public cloud providers, leveraging identity management systems for unified access control.
Unified logging and cloud monitoring ensure consistent visibility and performance monitoring. Tools like VMware, Cloud Foundation, or Azure Arc facilitate centralized management and integration, enabling seamless orchestration of workloads across hybrid environments.
Multi-cloud vendors offer flexibility by allowing organizations to choose different cloud providers for various workloads, optimizing performance and cost. Tools like cloud management platforms (CMPs), cloud consulting, and orchestration tools help manage resources across multiple clouds.
Hybrid cloud organizations combine on-premises infrastructure with public and private clouds, providing flexibility to balance workload placement based on requirements. It utilizes tools like cloud management platforms, hybrid cloud management solutions, and workload migration tools.
While multi-cloud offers more provider diversity, hybrid cloud allows for seamless integration of existing infrastructure with cloud services, offering greater flexibility in workload distribution and resource utilization.
Multi-cloud environments offer higher redundancy and fault tolerance compared to hybrid clouds. Multi-cloud setups utilize multiple cloud providers, ensuring redundancy across different platforms.
Tools such as Kubernetes for container orchestration and Terraform for infrastructure management enhance availability by enabling workload distribution and failover mechanisms across clouds.
Hybrid clouds, while offering some redundancy between on-premises and cloud environments, may face limitations in availability due to reliance on a single public cloud provider. Tools like VMware, vSphere, and Azure Arc help manage hybrid cloud environments. However, they may not offer the same level of redundancy as multi-cloud setups.
Multi-cloud typically involves paying for each cloud service individually based on usage, which can increase the complexity of managing costs.
Cloud cost management platforms, such as CloudHealth by VMware or Flexera cloud management platform, are commonly used in multi-cloud pricing management.
On the other hand, hybrid cloud architecture pricing often incorporates a mix of on-premises infrastructure costs and usage-based contracts with cloud providers.
Tools such as Microsoft Azure Cost Management or AWS Cost Explorer monitor and optimize costs within a hybrid cloud environment, including both on-premises and cloud resources.
Assessing the organization’s workloads before choosing a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud presents many challenges. Here are some tips they should consider to increase their chances of success:
Even though the migration processes remain unaffected, they will strongly affect the operations and efforts before and after. Partnering with Moon Technolabs will provide you with the required awareness and understanding of workload migration.
We are your trusted cloud development partner, helping you choose the right cloud strategy to protect your IT assets and infrastructure and deliver the resources you need.
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Jayanti Katariya is the CEO of Moon Technolabs, a fast-growing IT solutions provider, with 18+ years of experience in the industry. Passionate about developing creative apps from a young age, he pursued an engineering degree to further this interest. Under his leadership, Moon Technolabs has helped numerous brands establish their online presence and he has also launched an invoicing software that assists businesses to streamline their financial operations.
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