It comes as a shock to none that cloud technology is the next step towards the future. With many organizations integrating the cloud into their operations or moving the operations to their clouds, cloud technology is opening a gateway into organizational effectiveness. Apart from its popularity, the cloud is also deemed as the best fit for organizations to achieve objectives and fulfill their needs. With the cloud ecosystem offering an array of services, ranging from software as a service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Hybrid cloud strategies and multi-cloud strategies.

To expand on hybrid cloud and multi-cloud further, it is necessary to know their key differences. Before going into details, view the cloud as a means to the end goal of an organization to reach the maximum level of efficiency. Hence, each approach that involves cloud is either a service or a strategy to help an organization reach its ultimate objective and the case for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud is no different.

The Multi-Cloud Solution

Multi-cloud can be described as a collective approach to tackling different tasks. Multi-cloud, as the name depicts “multi”, taps many public cloud services to provide a solution to different domains of a single organization. More often than not, these collective public clouds are offered by different service providers to tackle an array of different task. This approach provides the best-fit solutions for various organization departments and their functions. As each individual department of an organization has different tasks, functions, and requirements, a one for all model is rarely deemed fit. Hence the use of a multi-cloud strategy or solution can best result in achieving organizational effectiveness. Moreover, the approach of adopting a multi-cloud strategy removes the concentration of dependency on a singular source. Resulting in lower costs, and more flexibility for the organization.

The Hybrid Cloud Solution

On the contrary to multi-cloud solutions, hybrid cloud not only taps public clouds but also encompasses private clouds. As multi-cloud strategy promotes the individual performance of various sectors, hybrid cloud strategy focuses on interactions between the platforms. In a hybrid environment, it is common to see two datasets often interchanging information or some form of intermingling between the two subsets. Hence, a hybrid cloud strategy provides an approach which mixes and matches to provide the best results, load balancing can easily be achieved. All while reaping the benefits of web capabilities. Moreover, hybrid cloud strategy also comes handy in times of data recovery and reducing downtime. As storage is provisioned across various suppliers, disaster recovery services can easily be availed.

While both the cloud strategies offer their own form of benefits they all strive to achieve the same goal. The type of strategy selected and deployed is primarily derived from the industry the organization functions in and what are the organizational objectives. To deem one more significant over the other is fundamentally selecting one over the other all while the results remain the same, with only the means varying.

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