What is Multi-Cloud?
Multi-cloud is when the application is hosted with multiple cloud platforms, and each delivers a specific service. It can comprise public, private, and hybrid clouds to achieve the Enterprise's end goals. Often, multi-cloud is confused with the hybrid Cloud, but it is different from a hybrid cloud because a hybrid cloud is an infrastructure while multi-cloud is a strategy. Multi-Cloud uses several different architectures like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to achieve business goals. It's about various providers to specify workloads requirements but not necessarily connected.
Why Use Multi-Cloud?
Enterprises select a Multi-Cloud Strategy for their benefits. For starters, multi-cloud is beneficial as if one Cloud is offline, then Enterprise may still work on the other clouds and achieve their goal. Multi-Cloud is customizable and flexible in the sense that an enterprise may "select the 'best' of each cloud type to suit their specific business requirements, economics, locations, and timing." Another significant drawback of multi-cloud is that enterprises can escape vendor lock-in as data is stored on various service provider's clouds.A multi-cloud is usually comprised of a private, public cloud to fulfill the organization’s end goals, which vary from organization to organization. Source: Multi-Cloud Management and Strategy
Why Multi-Clouds is Important?
Listed below are the various reason for which Multi-cloud is important-
Shadow IT
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Flexibility
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Proximity
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Failover
Kubernetes Federation provides high availability by sharing load across the cluster. Click to explore about, Multi-Cloud Kubernetes Solution and Strategy
What is Hybrid Cloud?
Hybrid Cloud is the cloud computing surrounding that uses on-premises, private cloud, and third-party cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms. This allows the workload to move between private and public clouds. Hybrid Cloud gives more flexibility to businesses and more data deployment options.The Architecture of Hybrid Cloud
- To establish Hybrid Cloud, you require the availability of:
- Public Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) platform, such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud platform.
- Construction of the private Cloud, either through a hosted private cloud provider or on-premises
- Adequate Wide area network for the connectivity between the two environments.
Typically enterprises choose the public Cloud to access compute instances, storage resources, or other services, such as the big data analytics clusters or serverless compute capabilities. Enterprise has no direct control over the architecture of a public cloud. The enterprise must architect its private Cloud to achieve compatibility with the desired public Cloud for hybrid cloud deployment.
This involves implementing suitable hardware in the datacenter like Servers, Storage, Local Area networks (LAN), and Load Balancers. For a successful hybrid Cloud, you should have a hypervisor and cloud software layers that are compatible with the desired public Cloud and ensuring proper interoperability with that public Cloud's application programming interfaces (APIs) and services. This enables instances to migrate seamlessly between public and private clouds. The developer can also create advanced applications by using a mix of services and resources across the public and private platforms. 
Hybrid Cloud Use-Cases
- Hybrid Cloud Computing enables you to deploy on-premises private Cloud to host sensitive or critical workloads and uses public Cloud to host less critical workloads such as test and development workloads. It is valuable for dynamic or highly changeable workloads. For example, a transactional order entry system when experiencing high demand is an excellent example of a hybrid Cloud. An application can run in a private Cloud but use a public Cloud to access additional computing resources when computing demand is high.
- Another Use case is Big Data Processing. For example, A company or Enterprise can use the hybrid cloud storage is to retain its accumulated business, sales, test, and other data, And can run analytical queries workloads on the public Cloud, which scales up Hadoop or any other analytics cluster to support highly distributed computing tasks.
- When launching an application, it is not clear will it succeed in the market. Cloud-oriented businesses follow the mantra "fail fast, fail cheaply." Considering this, organizations use public cloud resources for new, untested applications before making huge expenditures associated with launching in a private cloud. Once an organization succeeds in the application, it may choose to bring the application to a private cloud environment.
Hybrid Multi-Cloud environment removes the usage of a single cloud by providing the utilization of two or more public clouds and private clouds as well. Click to explore about, Hybrid Multi-Cloud - Management and Strategies
Multi-Cloud Use-Cases
- Multicloud storage services provide storage capabilities and highly efficient data transfer to create low-cost, flexible, and safe alternatives for cloud backup, 42% of enterprises use the cloud for backup. They cut the cost by increasing the performance and scalability of object storage, making it possible for long-term retention and archiving of critical data into the Cloud.
- An organization's most sensitive and essential data is stored in SQL, MongoDB, and mysql. If anything goes wrong with the database, the results could be disastrous. Not possible to do Clustering without two compute instances with cloud block storage. The multi-cloud provides hosting of those critical databases in a cloud with added redundancy. This ensures that the data is still available if anything goes wrong with the Cloud. In addition, organizations use multi-cloud because clustering can be done to add shared access to the Cloud where this data is being stored.
- Multi-Cloud strategies enable organizations to avoid vendor lock-in with any cloud provider. The multi-cloud philosophy is to provide increased capability and flexibility to move around and access data. This helps organizations to switch between public cloud providers as per organization requirements.
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Conclusion
Talking about Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud, both can take place on an individual level and a company-wide level. It’s no longer a debate of Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. Instead, it becomes a matter of competition, thereby implementing them in the right degree and combination. This grants freedom to any company in lowering IT costs, reducing the staff needs while increasing productivity.- Explore more about Multi vs Hybrid vs Hybrid Multi-Cloud vs. Private Cloud
- Read more about What is Managed Hybrid Multi-Cloud Service?
- Learn How to secure your Cloud-Native Applications end-to-end?
