What is a Multi-cloud Environment? | Glossary | A10 Networks
Skip to main content Skip to search
Start Your Free Trial
Glossary of Terms

What is a Multicloud Environment?

Multicloud Infrastructures are the New Standard for Enterprise IT

The term Multicloud refers to the use of multiple cloud services within the same enterprise architecture. A multicloud environment can encompass any number of infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), and software (SaaS) services from different vendors.

There are several benefits to employing a multicloud approach to IT. The organization can reduce its reliance on any single vendor to support disaster recovery and ensure business continuity, and use multicloud load balancing to distribute traffic intelligently across resources for optimal efficiency and performance.

Developers and business units gain the flexibility to choose the most appropriate infrastructure for the services they deploy and the geographies in which they operate, and IT can tailor data storage to requirements for cost, performance, and regulatory requirements.

It’s useful to understand the difference between multicloud and hybrid cloud. While hybrid cloud refers to the use of a mixture of deployment modes within an architecture, such as legacy on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments, multicloud is the use of multiple public cloud environments from more than one vendor, with or without additional private cloud resources.


Learn more about simplifying load balancing in a multi-cloud environment

How A10 Networks Helps Organizations Leverage Multicloud Environments

The flexibility and diversity of a multicloud architecture can deliver significant business and IT benefits, but it can also pose challenges around multicloud management, security, and governance. A10 Networks makes multicloud deployments simpler, more secure, and more manageable with Polynimbus secure application services, which provide a central point of control across multicloud resources and vendors. Polynimbus application services are delivered through solutions including A10 Networks Thunder® ADC and A10 Networks Thunder® CFW.

Mapping the Multicloud Enterprise

As the race to the cloud accelerates, both the benefits and the challenges of multicloud environments are becoming ever clearer. There is no question that multicloud deployments now play a foundational role in everything from internal business needs to digital transformation initiatives.
Watch the Webinar

< Back to Glossary of Terms