Hybrid Cloud vs Multi-Cloud: What’s the Big Difference?
by Harold Bell
The arrival of cloud computing to enterprise IT brought much more than new business value and end-user utility. Most notably, confusion. An entirely new set of terms was created to describe the many varieties of virtual data storage and transmission. First, we learned about private clouds, or cloud environments that were created to only support workloads from a specific organization. Private cloud infrastructure like this is usually, but not always, created utilizing resources within a company’s own on-premises data center. Then as time progressed, someone told us about public clouds, or clouds that are publicly accessed and consumed. This means that all hardware-based networking, storage, and compute resources are owned and managed by a third-party provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Though workloads are partitioned for data security, these resources are shared by the customers of a particular public cloud provider.
With now two types of clouds to account for, we would naturally need terminology to describe the transmission of applications and data between public and private clouds. This architecture is what we define as a hybrid cloud. Despite public and private clouds being independently operated, this data sharing is made possible by using encrypted connections. This encrypted highway of sorts allows cloud operators to perform a single task leveraging two separate cloud resources — most commonly a private and a public environment. If you were to visualize a Venn diagram, and assigned a public cloud on the left and a private on the right, a hybrid cloud would entail the sum of both parts. The overlapping space in the middle represents the encrypted layer.
This middle ground between public and private clouds provides a vital bridge for data transmission. It allows organizations to leverage cloud capabilities without compromising productivity or security. Scenarios in which a hybrid cloud model is utilized include:
- Companies who are migrating from a complete on-premises solution to a configuration that incorporates some usage of public cloud capacity
- Organizations that are moving back to a private, on-premises data center from being primarily cloud-based
- IT departments that are deploying a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution in which computational resources can be leveraged without measurable data risk
