By providing flexible, vendor-neutral infrastructure, hybrid cloud and multicloud strategies empower organizations to rapidly deploy compute resources, experiment with new technologies, and scale as needed. They can reduce the expense of purchasing and maintaining compute servers they may not always need, without limiting capacity during peaks. “For example,” says Petry, “a company might use a public cloud for an experimental project requiring high scalability, while keeping core business systems on a private cloud for security reasons. As the project grows, resources can be added to or removed from the cloud without disrupting operations.”
Such flexible strategies are increasing competition among cloud providers, which may help drive innovation, product differentiation, and price competitiveness. But, even as a multicloud approach eliminates dependence on any one cloud provider, it also reduces negotiating power because a company’s commitment to each vendor is smaller.
Other potential downsides include greater operational complexity and a new requirement to move data between clouds for different types of processing. Following a rise in cloud-related cyber-attacks in recent years, security should also be factored into the decision.
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