Gartner defines distributed hybrid infrastructure as offerings that deliver cloud-native attributes, which can be deployed and operated where the customer prefers. This is a key distinction to public cloud IaaS, which is based on a centralized approach. Offerings are software and/or integrated hardware with a unified control plane.

Distributed hybrid infrastructure provides the foundation for the deployment of applications in a distributed manner that retains a cloud or cloud-inspired approach. In doing so, it improves agility and flexibility for the workloads outside of public cloud infrastructure.