Every cloud provider will tell you their setup is the right one, which is not especially useful when you are trying to make an actual decision. Here is what each deployment model actually means and which businesses tend to land on each one.
Public cloud
Your infrastructure runs on shared hardware owned by AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, alongside thousands of other customers, with strict isolation between accounts. This is the default choice for most businesses because it needs no upfront hardware investment, scales up or down as you need it, and the provider handles the physical infrastructure entirely. The tradeoff is less control over exactly where your data physically sits, which matters for some regulated industries and some data residency requirements.
Private cloud
Infrastructure dedicated entirely to one organisation, either hosted on your own premises or by a provider in a dedicated environment not shared with anyone else. This costs more and takes longer to set up than public cloud, but it gives you full control over configuration, security and exactly where data lives. Banks, government contractors, and healthcare organisations with strict compliance requirements often end up here, not because private cloud is inherently better, but because their regulatory obligations leave less room for the shared-infrastructure model.
Hybrid cloud
A mix of public and private, usually because part of a business's workload has to stay on dedicated infrastructure for compliance or latency reasons, while everything else runs on public cloud for cost and flexibility. A common real example: customer-facing systems run on public cloud for easy scaling during traffic spikes, while a core database with strict data residency requirements stays on private infrastructure. Done well, this gives you the best of both. Done badly, it means paying for two sets of infrastructure and the engineering overhead of keeping them talking to each other properly.
Multi-cloud
Running workloads across more than one public cloud provider, for example some services on AWS and others on Azure. Businesses choose this to avoid depending entirely on one vendor, to use each provider's particular strength for a specific workload, or because a merger left them running two different clouds and untangling it was not worth the cost. Multi-cloud adds real operational complexity since your team needs to be capable across multiple platforms, so it is worth doing deliberately rather than by accident.
How to actually decide
Start with your real constraints, not with what sounds impressive. If you have no specific compliance or data residency requirement, public cloud is almost always the right starting point: lower cost, less operational overhead, and easy to change later if your needs change. Move toward hybrid or private only when you have a concrete reason (a regulation, a client contract, a specific latency requirement), not as a default "just in case" decision, because that "just in case" flexibility usually costs more than it is worth for a business that never actually needed it.
If you are trying to work out which model actually fits your situation rather than guessing from a vendor's sales pitch, our cloud team can walk through the real requirements with you before you commit to an architecture.