According to a survey, 23.5% of small business owners were running only one-quarter of their business in the cloud a few years ago. However, this figure increased to over 70% after cloud computing started gaining popularity. Now, business owners rely on the cloud to host their company’s website and applications.
Amidst, all the types of cloud hosting techniques, Hybrid cloud and Multi-cloud are the most popular ones. While both the cloud models have wide differences, organizations can adopt services that best suits their requirements. Sometimes these models are interchangeably used. So, let us take a closer look at these options and discuss how they might work for businesses.
What is a Hybrid Cloud Solution?
Hybrid cloud solutions are a combination of public cloud infrastructure and private, on-premise hardware systems, serving best of both the worlds. Being popular among users, a hybrid cloud offers the advantage of the cost-effective third-party support of public cloud along with the security benefits and enhanced performance of the private cloud.
Some of the user applications run through the cloud in a hybrid cloud environment, while other applications remain on the in-house servers. These applications are later presented using a unified interface, such as a hosted desktop, offering a consistent and seamless end-user experience.
This hosted desktop offers business flexibility, explaining how hybrid cloud solutions work with, access and store data. For instance, various regulatory compliances require some applications to remain on-premise. Users can run these applications on their own servers while pushing less stringent processes or larger workloads into the cloud.
One of the major advantages of hybrid cloud computing approach is that it allows users to test a cloud system in a limited way before committing, thus verifying the hybrid cloud solution for its cost-effectiveness and scalability.
However, implementing hybrid cloud solutions is never free. Users are required to pay an upfront cost to hire a cloud service provider, prepare the data for the hybrid solutions and determine the storage location of the information and applications. If users are looking to host limited data and basic applications such as email into the cloud, a hybrid approach is the best fit. Hybrid cloud computing is ideal for businesses with complex data security requirements as the cloud providers have a higher level of expertise in this area. The cloud providers can set up a hybrid cloud system that secures business-critical data on-premise and route safe transactions in consideration with necessary guidelines and compliances.
What is a Multi-cloud Solution?
Multi-cloud solution is a flexible combination from different cloud service providers. A multi-cloud model implements various cloud services from different service providers, ranging from Google Cloud, AWS, IBM, and Microsoft Azure. Finding a single cloud provider that offers a particular combination is quite difficult. However, a Multi-cloud approach allows the user to tailor each solution to meet the precise business requirements.
Multi-cloud solutions have their own set of advantages that includes freedom from a single vendor, ensuring security requirements by picking and choosing individual providers for individual needs. Since the user chooses his own components, so any combination of cloud models, from the platform as a service (PaaS) to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to software as a services (SaaS) tools, help the business grow and innovate.
The only downside of the Multi-cloud approach is that it requires expert assistance to handle different systems. The user might try using a Multi-cloud solution if their current provider does not support the services as required by their respective businesses or the existing infrastructure causes problems rather than solving them out. As the users pick individual cloud services to meet business-critical demands, the Multi-cloud approach helps them maintain budgetary constraints by reducing the cost. With the help of Multi-cloud computing, users can also choose the origin of their computing resources to enjoy faster load times and experience improved customer services.
