The cloud has completely changed how businesses operate, allowing them to be more agile and dynamic with their strategies, offerings, and resources. It’s almost impossible to imagine an organization that doesn’t use some form of cloud technology or service.
Companies are shifting their focus from on-premises hardware infrastructure to leveraging managed services offered in the cloud. Organizations now benefit from the lower total cost of ownership, easier access to new services, faster deployment times, and better scalability and availability.
SEE: What Is the Difference between Cloud Computing and Virtualization? (TechRepublic)
What is multicloud architecture?
Multicloud architecture uses multiple cloud services from different providers to serve various needs and requirements. It gives companies the ability to have control over where data, applications, and workloads are hosted.
This setup can increase availability and redundancy as well as improve performance by allowing enterprises to spread their workloads across different providers. It also allows organizations to switch between service providers depending on their offerings.
Companies can mix and match storage, networking, analytics, and application platforms from multiple providers instead of getting all of their resources from one provider that might not be the best fit for their workloads.
SEE: Top 5 Best Practices for Cloud Security (TechRepublic)
What is the basic pattern for multicloud architecture?
Multicloud architecture patterns are split between distributed and redundant deployments.
Distributed deployment patterns
These distribute workloads across many providers for improved availability, increased scalability, and lower cost. These patterns are especially effective when using a cloud provider’s feature or capability.
Patterns include:
- Tiered hybrid: This usually consists of front- and back-end applications.
- Partitioned multicloud: Allows users to relocate workloads around as needed and to maintain portability.
- Cloud analytics: This puts analytical tasks on the cloud and feeds back data as needed.
- Edge hybrid: Solves connectivity issues by conducting time- and business-critical tasks locally at the network edge and leveraging the cloud for other workloads.
Redundant deployment patterns
Redundant deployments ensure fault tolerance by running two or more copies of the same system in parallel. Deploying across multiple regions ensures resilience in case disaster strikes one region while providing proximity and access to resources.
Patterns include:
- Active-active: The application is hosted across various cloud providers. Each application has a load balancer in front to manage traffic.
- Active-passive: The alternative cloud provider is only used if a server crashes or service is interrupted. It could fail over to a backup server at preset traffic triggers, and traffic is automatically sent to the secondary provider rather than the main server.
- Public-private: Includes public and private cloud servers. Private clouds often feature a firewall and more comprehensive security to limit access to what’s required to share with the private cloud.
SEE: Advantages of Virtualization in Cloud Computing (TechRepublic)
Types of multicloud architecture?
Cloudification
Application components are hosted on-premises, and after migration to a public cloud, they continue to run as they did before. Cloudification allows applications hosted on-premises to use cloud services from different cloud platforms for improved performance and elasticity.
Multicloud relocation
This type allows organizations to move data and applications to different cloud providers, depending on their needs. It can be done for various reasons, such as cost savings, performance improvements, or to take advantage of new features.
Multicloud refactor
This one aims to take advantage of cloud bursting, high availability, and failover capabilities offered by multiple clouds. In order to do this, applications need to be re-architected, so they can be deployed in a multicloud environment. Applications are broken down into smaller, independent components that can be deployed and optimized on different clouds based on their specific needs and characteristics.
Multicloud rebinding
Rebinding involves re-architecting applications for migration to a multicloud architecture. It can be used to create highly available and fault-tolerant systems. It can also increase performance by distributing workloads across multiple clouds. This architecture has a split between on-premises and cloud resources, with some components remaining on-premises while others are moved to the cloud.
Multicloud rebinding with cloud brokerage
In this scenario, a cloud brokerage service is used to assist in the process of connecting multiple cloud services. This allows a re-architected application to be deployed partially on multicloud infrastructure. This can improve availability by ensuring no single point of failure exists for any part of the application.
Multi-application modernization
This type requires re-architecting several apps as a portfolio and then deploying them in a multicloud network architecture, instead of merely re-architecting a single application for multicloud deployment.
SEE: A Brief History of Cloud Computing (TechRepublic)
The benefits of multicloud architecture
There are a number of advantages.
Avoid vendor lock-in
Organizations can use multiple providers and their different services, as best suits their needs.
Increase flexibility and agility
Companies can switch between cloud platforms to meet their changing requirements.
Improve disaster recovery
Organizations are able to distribute their workloads across various cloud providers.
Optimize cloud costs
Money can be saved by hosting applications on the most appropriate type of cloud that suits an organization’s needs. Companies only pay for what they use, and they can scale up or down as required.
SEE: What Is Hybrid Cloud? (TechRepublic)
Multicloud vs hybrid cloud: What’s the difference?
Multicloud and the hybrid cloud can be confusing because they involve using more than one cloud environment. The main difference is that a multicloud strategy uses multiple cloud providers for different purposes, while a hybrid cloud integrates on-premises and cloud resources.
A multicloud strategy allows businesses to choose the best fit for different workloads, while a hybrid approach allows more control over workload placement and customization options.
This article was originally published in August 2022. It was updated by Antony Peyton in June 2025.
