What type of cloud combines multiple clouds, allowing them to retain their unique identities?

The correct choice is indeed the hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud architecture enables businesses to maintain distinct workloads in different environments—typically a combination of on-premises infrastructure, private clouds, and public clouds—while still connecting them to work together as a single system. This approach provides flexibility, scalability, and optimization, allowing organizations to choose which resources to keep private and which to allocate to the public cloud, based on their specific needs.

In this model, the unique identities of the various clouds are preserved while enabling interoperability. This integration supports various strategies, such as load balancing and disaster recovery, by allowing data and applications to move seamlessly between different environments.

While the other options present types of cloud services, they do not describe a configuration that combines multiple clouds while retaining their individuality in the same manner as a hybrid cloud does. For instance, a public cloud primarily offers services over the internet to a broad audience without retaining the unique identities of private resources. A private cloud refers specifically to computing resources used exclusively by one business or organization, maintaining a distinct type of infrastructure that does not interact in the same manner as hybrid systems. A multi-cloud strategy involves using multiple cloud services from different providers, but it does not necessarily integrate them to the degree that a hybrid cloud does,