Judging from search engine traffic — and from the calls I receive — there’s some confusion out there about hybrid cloud and multicloud. In truth, both are completely viable models, with various organizations relying on each to achieve significant business benefits. But before IT and business leaders can decide which approach makes the most sense for them, they need to step back and ask themselves what outcomes they are trying to achieve.

The cloud migration plan that many companies follow largely consists of a single step: migrate. They pick an application that they think they could manage more effectively in the public cloud, shift workloads to a cloud provider’s environment and then see how things go. The problem is that it’s easy to migrate resources to the…

I frequently consult with customers comparing hyperscale public cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google for their data and applications. The workloads they want to evaluate typically fit into one of three categories: A lift-and-shift of virtual or physical workloads into public cloud A partial or full refactoring/modernization of an on-premises…