Multi-Cloud vs. Hybrid Cloud: What's the Difference?

Published on October 3, 2022,

by Mike Schmitt

First, a multi-cloud is a hybrid cloud, but a hybrid cloud is not just a multi-cloud. When the term multi-cloud is used, it refers to an organization that uses more than one public cloud provider (AWS, Azure, Google…). They may have sophisticated applications that help them broker cost, placement, and migration of workloads across the various public cloud providers to optimize cost and performance best.

The term hybrid cloud is much broader as it encompasses the entire digital computing infrastructure, data centers, private clouds, colocation facilities, micro data centers, and public cloud providers.

While a handful of large organizations and lots of smaller ones have a 100% public cloud infrastructure, most organizations embrace physical and virtual environments. It is essential to treat the entire Hybrid Digital Infrastructure as a single entity and not silo off the data center from the public cloud.

HDIM or Hybrid Digital Infrastructure Management solutions provide the architecture to manage such a multifaceted infrastructure. To complete the picture, it leverages DCIM for physical and virtual infrastructure management and other tools such as cloud brokerage and analytics tools.