Multi-cloud & Hybrid Cloud: How They Improve Infrastructure

A teammate who doesn’t work well with others is a liability, and the same is true of your business’s technology. When applications and systems can’t communicate, it creates all types of problems for your team. Disparate systems hurt productivity in many ways, like having to move data manually and getting an incomplete picture of your company’s data.

Companies recognize the issues with disparate systems and have responded with solutions to overcome these hurdles. These solutions include multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing. How do these computing methods work?

A multi-cloud setup is a cloud configuration that includes more than one cloud deployment of the same type (private or public). For example, a company may leverage several public cloud services like AWS and Azure. A hybrid cloud setup includes multiple deployment types (private and public) and integrates these deployments to work together seamlessly. For example, a company may mix a private cloud hosted by their organization with a public cloud service like Azure.

The benefit of these technologies is that they allow different systems to communicate and share data, making your team’s life easier. Both cloud setups increase the flexibility of your network and your computing potential.

The Benefits of Multi-cloud and Hybrid Cloud Computing

Moving to the cloud can improve your computing reliability and agility. In what ways? To answer that, we’ll look at the benefits of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud computing.

Flexibility. Cloud solutions give companies additional options when they upgrade their infrastructure. The hybrid cloud lets businesses keep part of their infrastructure on-premises. As a result, businesses can transition to cloud solutions incrementally. Many teams find this incremental move more feasible and less daunting.

Multi-cloud computing provides flexibility by allowing you to leverage different cloud services simultaneously. This gives your team access to additional tools and cloud providers that serve specific regions — bringing data closer to users and improving network performance.

Reliability. Outages in your infrastructure can hurt performance, stall work, and even cause you to lose customers. A reliable network isn’t one that never has issues but rather a network with contingencies that protect users from the effects of infrastructure problems.

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing help you create robust backups that allow for dynamic failover switching. So, even if your system experiences an outage, it won’t impact your users. The difference between hybrid and multi-cloud is that a hybrid cloud setup will use a combination of onsite infrastructure and cloud services. In contrast, multi-cloud computing will use a mixture of cloud providers to achieve the same result.

Security. Factors like shadow IT and security requirements for sensitive data can dictate the setup of your cloud computing. Sensitive data requires fine-tuned controls that allow your organization to control access to documents and where data is stored. A hybrid setup permits organizations to store sensitive data onsite while using the cloud for other services.

Multi-cloud setups help you better assimilate shadow IT applications. For example, it may be more cost-effective and productive to embrace a new cloud application and add it to your toolset instead of migrating data from shadow IT applications. Embracing the shadow application gives IT control and visibility over these previously unmonitored applications.

Scalability. The beauty of cloud computing is that it enables businesses to respond to business growth efficiently. Instead of purchasing new infrastructure every time demand spikes, you can quickly increase and decrease computing power based on usage — keeping resources aligned with needs and avoiding over-purchasing.

A hybrid cloud setup further allows companies to keep some infrastructure onsite for lower long-term costs while leveraging cloud computing for overflow and specific application use cases.

Use the Cloud to Plan Long-Term

We know that computing infrastructure is critical to the success of our applications and services. However, we don’t know what traffic and demand will look like tomorrow. The cloud gives companies the best of both worlds by providing them with the resources they need today and the flexibility to pivot to the needs of tomorrow.

The choice between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing depends on your business’s requirements. OneNeck can help you analyze those requirements and make a choice that will benefit your company long-term. Talk to our team today and learn how cloud computing can supercharge your IT infrastructure.

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