Although the terms hyperconverged infrastructure and cloud are often used interchangeably, they are not the same. Both offer a way to streamline storage, compute, server, and network management, but their approaches differ. In a cloud model, physical storage, compute, and networking resources are pooled and distributed using an abstraction layer. HCI, meanwhile, is a software-defined framework that virtualizes and combines compute, network, storage, and server resources into a unified platform designed for simplicity and scalability.