According to Flexera's latest State of Cloud Report, it projects that 86% of organizations are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy, and 70% are subscribers of hybrid cloud solutions. It shows that nearly all organizations are leveraging multiple cloud platforms and selecting strategies and use cases that work best for their business.
Businesses are switching to cloud hosting services to improve the scalability and performance of their operations. Cloud hosting is an integral part of contemporary IT environments with the capability of storing data, running applications, and scaling on demand. In the world of cloud computing, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are on the rise. Each has its benefits and trade-offs; however, determining what works best for you depends on your organization's needs and objectives. Let's review the pros and cons of each by identifying what cloud hosting strategy would be a winner for your organization.
When you decide to subscribe to cloud solutions, one key consideration could be the cloud hosting price. The costing factor for cloud hosting is dependent on your specific requirements from the provider. For example, it may seem sensible to consider a multi-cloud strategy where companies use more than one cloud to distribute their workloads. It also prevents vendor lock-in and loss of profitability by eliminating the risk of downtime. Hybrid configurations could offer better organization by combining an establishment's infrastructure with public and private clouds. It would give a business more options on how and when they want to plan around operational costs while maximizing performance.
What is Multi-Cloud Hosting?
With multi-cloud hosting, businesses can select multiple cloud providers for better organizational data and operational workload management. They can subscribe to multi-cloud hosting to benefit from the capabilities, strengths, and flexibility of multiple cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). A provider may have a better data source, or one provider scales in AI and machine learning than another. Multi-cloud hosting enables businesses to better utilize their infrastructure by selecting a comprehensive tool set from multiple providers with various applications.
Distributing workloads across multiple clouds reduces downtime risks due to outages from a single cloud service provider. If one cloud service suffers an outage, the other cloud service providers can continue to run applications and perform data management without interruption. The increased complexity of multi-cloud architecture can raise operational costs. It can be a time-consuming proposition for smaller companies with limited IT resources.
What is Hybrid Cloud Hosting?
Using hybrid cloud hosting, businesses can secure their sensitive data or applications in a private cloud or on their premises. They can utilize public cloud resources for less sensitive workloads. In this way, businesses can benefit from public cloud resource scaling and cost balances, while still providing a level of ownership and security for specific applications and data.
A primary reason some businesses target hybrid solutions is to provide better flexibility while managing sensitive data. Businesses gain flexibility in hosting environments, customizations to suit their organizational processes, and levels of security and controls. However, the attributes of hybrid solutions range widely and are more expensive, complicated, and demand expertise in the cloud management process.
Key Differences in Cost Efficiency
When it comes to cloud hosting costs, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud both have unique features and limitations. A multi-cloud environment facilitates businesses to take advantage of cost affordability while utilizing a cost-effective storage solution from one cloud provider and inexpensive computing power from another.
Hybrid cloud hosting follows a streamlined pricing structure because there are fewer cloud providers to choose from. Some infrastructure is placed on-premises to keep hosting costs under control. However, some businesses may still incur substantial upfront costs due to private cloud infrastructure or on-premise hardware.
Flexibility, Scalability, and Control
Service flexibility is one of the major plus points of multi-cloud hosting. For instance, one provider may excel at machine learning, while another one may be better at big data analytics. Ultimately, this level of flexibility enables infrastructure optimization based on workload intensity.
With hybrid cloud hosting, organizations still have some degree of on-premise control, allowing them to customize their hosting environment more specifically. Hybrid cloud ensures the best of both worlds, allowing them to keep sensitive workloads secure while utilizing the public cloud to scale resources for less critical workloads.
Security Considerations
One of the security advantages of multi-cloud for organizations is that they place their data across clouds, which minimizes the risk of data loss through failover points. However, maintaining consistency in data, applying security protocols, and ensuring compliance across multiple cloud solutions can be difficult.
A hybrid cloud setup is an ideal solution for websites that involve sensitive customer data. Despite being able to keep sensitive data secured in a private environment, they still need to invest in security tools and monitoring systems.
Conclusion
You must invest in the best hosting plan that perfectly aligns with the core of your business. Multi-cloud may be a better choice if you value flexibility or working with multiple cloud providers for different workloads. If your operations involve sensitive data and you need an economical solution, then rely on a hybrid cloud hosting.