Multi-Cloud vs Hybrid-Cloud Comparison Costs and Tradeoffs

January 24, 2022

Multi-Cloud vs Hybrid-Cloud Comparison Costs and Tradeoffs

As more organizations migrate to the cloud, they often face the question of whether to use a multi-cloud or a hybrid-cloud approach. While both models offer their advantages, companies must weigh the cost and tradeoffs of each approach.

Multi-Cloud Approach

Multi-cloud, as the name suggests, refers to using multiple public cloud providers simultaneously. This model offers companies greater flexibility, agility, and cost optimization. Some benefits of using a multi-cloud approach are:

Freedom to choose the right cloud provider for specific use cases: With the multi-cloud approach, you can select the ideal cloud provider for each workload based on the service, feature sets, pricing, and support.
Avoid vendor lock-in: Multi-cloud eliminates the risk of vendor lock-in. Companies can switch between cloud providers or keep applications on specific clouds based on vendor performance, pricing, or feature availability.

However, a multi-cloud approach can also lead to a more complicated management structure, making cloud billing and cost management more challenging. Bills and metrics data may come from different cloud providers, making it difficult to track expenses and allocate costs.

According to Flexera's 2021 State of the Cloud Report, the average organization uses 3.7 public clouds and spends an average of $2.7 million per year on public cloud services. The study further states that 92% of respondents have a multi-cloud strategy.

Hybrid-Cloud Approach

Hybrid cloud combines private and public clouds, giving companies the best of both worlds. This model lets businesses store sensitive data on-premises and utilize public cloud resources for other applications, ensuring regulatory compliance, and data security.

Hybrid cloud provides several benefits, including:

Scalability: A hybrid cloud approach enables businesses to scale their infrastructure quickly and seamlessly during traffic spikes and high resource usage periods.
Cost savings: With the hybrid approach, businesses can use on-premises resources for tasks that require dedicated hardware, such as high-performance computing, and public clouds for development and testing, saving money in the process.

However, managing a hybrid cloud can be more challenging than managing a single cloud provider. Two different environments must be integrated and managed, and any changes in one environment may affect the other. Additionally, depending on the implementation, the cost of the hybrid approach can be more expensive than multi-cloud or single-cloud approaches.

Conclusion

While both multi-cloud and hybrid cloud approaches have advantages and tradeoffs, businesses should choose the option that aligns with their specific needs. Multi-cloud offers flexibility and agility to choose the most competent cloud provider for each case, while hybrid cloud offers security, scalability, and cost savings. Company size, regulatory compliance requirements, geographic expansion, performance, and budget will ultimately affect the decision of choosing multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud.

Businesses must also work with cloud management platforms such as Azure Cost Management, AWS Cost Explorer, or Google Cloud's Pricing Calculator to manage their cloud usage and allocate costs effectively, regardless of whether they adopt multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, or single-cloud deployments.

References

We hope our comparison has shed some light on the multi-cloud versus hybrid-cloud debate. For more information on cloud cost management and billing, stay tuned to Flare Compare.