Microsoft Azure provides a comprehensive set of products and features to help organizations build and operate their technology solutions in the cloud. However, many businesses find themselves needing to leverage multiple private and public clouds to meet their specific business requirements. This article outlines Microsoft’s perspective on the important cloud computing concepts of hybrid and multicloud, and provides guidance on navigating the associated challenges and opportunities.

Defining Hybrid and Multicloud

A hybrid cloud combines a private, on-premises cloud infrastructure with a public cloud provided by a third-party. This allows data and applications to seamlessly move between the two environments. Many organizations choose a hybrid cloud strategy to meet regulatory requirements, maximize existing technology investments, or address latency concerns.

The hybrid cloud is also evolving to include edge computing, where cloud-managed devices bring the power of the public cloud closer to IoT data sources. This reduces latency and enables reliable offline operations.

Multicloud refers to the use of cloud services from multiple providers, both private and public. A multicloud strategy provides greater flexibility and risk mitigation by allowing organizations to choose the best services for each workload or leveraging different providers in specific regions.

The Hybrid and Multicloud Narrative

A well-designed hybrid cloud platform can provide organizations with significant advantages, including greater flexibility, control, scalability, and improved workload and cost efficiency. Hybrid computing enables seamless scaling between on-premises and public cloud resources to handle fluctuating demands without sacrificing data security or compliance.

Hybrid and multicloud strategies also allow organizations to modernize mission-critical applications and data while retaining sensitive information on-premises. This can eliminate the need for large capital expenditures on infrastructure to address short-term spikes in demand or disaster recovery.

However, these strategies also come with challenges. Avoiding cloud provider lock-in may require limiting cloud adoption to basic infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities or investing heavily in cloud-native technologies. And existing operations management platforms often struggle to support the unique environments created by hybrid and multicloud approaches.

Minimizing Hybrid and Multicloud Concerns with Unified Operations

To address these challenges, it’s important to understand the concept of unified operations before embarking on a hybrid and multicloud journey. Consistent operations practices across all cloud environments, with a common control plane, can help organizations overcome many of the concerns associated with these strategies.

Organizations should carefully evaluate whether they need to duplicate operations for each cloud provider or if a unified operations approach to cloud management is a better fit before scaling their hybrid and multicloud adoption.

By understanding the key definitions, common motivations, and potential pitfalls, organizations can develop a comprehensive strategy to successfully navigate the hybrid and multicloud landscape and unlock the full benefits of the cloud.

Source: Introduction to hybrid and multicloud