Multi-cloud is the use of more than one cloud platform that each delivers a specific application or service. A multi-cloud architecture can be made up of two or more public or private clouds to achieve a business’s IT goals.

What is the difference between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud?

There are several distinct differences between Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architectures.

Traditionally ‘Hybrid cloud’ has meant the combination of private (either on-premises or hosted in a datacentre) and public cloud infrastructure, with application tools used to orchestrate and deploy workloads and manage the balance between the two.

Multi-cloud by contrast has more of a strategic emphasis. Enterprises use multiple cloud providers to meet different business requirements. At its most granular, multi-cloud is made up of various IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services with the cloud-native applications being the most mature, which are built up from containers and microservices, and provided by different cloud providers.

The main difference between the two is ‘Hybrid cloud’ refers to multiple cloud platforms, multi-cloud refers to multiple cloud services or vendors.

Benefits of a multi-cloud approach?

Many businesses nowadays have adopted a multi-cloud strategy by deploying applications and services across several cloud environments.  There are many reasons for this, including:

Remove Vendor Lock-In – one of the most common reasons organisations adopt a multi-cloud strategy is the desire not to lock into any particular cloud provider. Enterprises recognise that no one provider can be everything to everyone. A multi-cloud approach gives organisations the flexibility to identify and partner with the vendors that have best-of-breed solutions that best align to their business needs.

Improved Performance – organisations with a wide range of cloud-based workloads can minimise latency and other performance barriers, such as packet loss, by investing in multiple cloud providers closest to where the applications and users are.

Compliance Management– Data governance often requires customer data to be held in different locations. Using a multi-cloud strategy improves adherence to such policies.

High Availability and Resilience – All cloud providers, even hyperscale ones with multiple geographically dispersed, redundant datacentres – suffer outages from time to time. If organisations put their dependency only on one cloud provider, they run the risk of their mission-critical applications becoming unavailable. A multi-cloud strategy allows for better security, failover, and disaster recovery – and resilience.

Challenges

Although a multi-cloud strategy has its advantages such as greater flexibility and scalability, it can also cause complexity in deployment and management, including:

• Security and governance are more complicated. There are more “moving parts” which may create resiliency issues.
• Organisations could suffer a paradox of choice when having to select the right cloud products and services.
• Management complexity could become a problem especially if multi-cloud is adopted in an ad hoc manner rather than been planned from the ground up.

• Organisations could experience perimeter dissolution.In a single cloud environment, it is easy to build a perimeter to protect sensitive data and workloads which are residing in the same cloud. With a multi-cloud approach, data is spread across multiple cloud locations, making it easier to access, traverse across different cloud locations and blur the lines. Therefore, strategies zero-trust become imperative to implement.

• A multi-cloud approach does not provide the same level of visibility as a single cloud environment. As underline infrastructure becomes more abstract, as more clouds are adopted, operation levels could reduce as does the level of visibility and control.

• Organisations need to dedicate significant time monitoring all their assets (e.g., cloud functions) and resources across their entire multi-cloud environment, especially as modern software architecture continues to evolve, and their life span becomes shorter.

• As every cloud operates differently, organisations need to have robust policy and access control protocols to protect their data and workloads. Organisations need to be able to uniformly apply these policies and access control across their entire cloud environment.

Is a multi-cloud strategy right for you?

Cloud computing adoption is well established in enterprises, SMEs, and start-ups. But how much cloud should a business adopt? How should workloads be deployed across public, private, and hybrid clouds? And if multiple cloud providers (public and/or private) are used, which ones should you choose, and how can they be managed to a business’s best advantage? These are all questions organisations need to consider when determining what cloud strategy they will deploy.

Why appoint Oreta

At Oreta, we believe that understanding shared responsibilities is the key to adopting a multi-cloud environment. When keeping up with the rapid changes in business requirements, the right strategy should be chosen from the start.

If you are looking at a cloud deployment, then reach out to us. Our focus is on meeting your requirements as an organisation. We are here to partner with you and make your business an ongoing success.

Is your organisation, like many others, assessing the benefits of containers, but are struggling to go beyond establishing a Proof of Concept (PoC) due to the platform you are on?

Serverless computing, containers, and similar products such as Google Kubernetes, are influencing significant changes to the way organisations function. As the applications run quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another, organisations are investing in its potential to make them more agile and faster to market. They are experiencing an increase in visibility and portability towards application performance.

However, other organisations struggle to move beyond their PoCs to deployment due to their skillset and the cloud platform they are using.

Public cloud platforms, such as Google Cloud, have recognised this setback and are leading the way to make the underlying platforms easier to deploy and manage. However, these are only available to organisations that have migrated to the public cloud.

For organisations that use the private cloud, there is no easy solution. Several have considered building their own container stack. However, complications exist. Organisations must have a unique set of skills and know-how to scale, secure and manage it properly.

The Solution – Hybrid Cloud 

Many organisations that have experienced the added frustration of deploying containers from a private cloud platform are now transitioning to a hybrid environment – a solution that combines a private cloud with one or more public cloud services. Organisations that have transitioned to a hybrid platform can now manage their workloads from one location and benefit from the best of both worlds.

Organisations are experiencing greater flexibility, scalability, and control over their data. They can store sensitive data in the private cloud, while at the same time access computational resources of a managed public cloud. As a hybrid cloud only requires one plane of management, it is different and more straightforward than a multi-cloud strategy where organisations manage each cloud platform separately.

Other benefits of Hybrid Cloud

Organisations can also benefit from:

• Cost savings by extending their private resources to a public cloud only when necessary. Resources do not have to sit idle until they are needed.
• Deploying a private network on-site to handle internal needs which then extends to the public cloud when computational resources exceed local availability.
• Improvement in computing and storage power, whereby organisations are using less physical space which on-site servers often require.

Deploying Hybrid Cloud

The hybrid model provides the business with multiple options so that stakeholders can pick an environment that best suits their needs. Some examples include:

• Load-balancing between on-prem and public cloud depending on where the access is coming from.
• Develop in the public cloud to leverage cheaper resources and deploy production on-prem for compliance.
• Create a seamless integration into legacy environments as you go through a digital transformation.

Is Hybrid Cloud right for you?

Hybrid cloud is an effective way to align IT priorities with business needs.

When comparing which cloud platform to go with, organisations should not underestimate the flexibility, scalability, and responsiveness of a hybrid cloud. How much flexibility organisations need is dependent on its business goals, what compliance measures are in place, and how much is the business expected to evolve in the future.

Hybrid cloud is highly valuable for organisations with fluctuating workloads, large amounts of data that need processing regularly, and have large mixes of IT services and applications.

It can also be very beneficial for organisations that experience seasonal fluctuations. Organisations can identify when they require additional resources and utilise them at appropriate times, which in turn helps organisations optimise their costs.

Start your journey to hybrid cloud with Oreta.

Are you keen to shift to a hybrid cloud platform, improving the visibility and flexibility of your applications and workloads, but not quite sure how? Let us understand your business needs and pain points and tailor a solution that meets your business goals. We can work with you on all aspects of the transformation lifecycle from Architecture to Migration / Transformation or components of it.