Multi-Cloud Strategy

Modern enterprises are increasingly opting for a multi-cloud strategy. Many companies already started using a multiple-cloud strategy because it gives them more flexibility and allows them to innovate and deploy faster. This is especially true in light of the growing popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS) in businesses. 

Sourcing from multiple clouds is becoming more beneficial and provides businesses with a competitive advantage. However, adopting a multi-cloud strategy poses new integration challenges for companies. Learn about both sides.

What Is A Multi-Cloud Strategy?

In recent years, the cloud has been buzzing with innovations. Rather than sticking to one platform and missing out on the benefits, a multi-cloud approach allows you to combine the best parts of one or more cloud computing services from any other cloud computing service number providers. Depending on the features and services you want to offer, you can use a mix of private and public cloud strategies.

When an individual or organization uses more than one cloud provider for their IT needs, this is known as multi-cloud. This approach allows businesses to better support their business, technology, and service reliability needs while avoiding over-reliance on a single cloud provider that may not be capable of completing all tasks.

A multi-cloud strategy can include private, public, and hybrid clouds, allowing companies to manage multiple providers and virtual infrastructure performance more efficiently. The multi-cloud architecture allows for the distribution of cloud applications, assets, and software across multiple environments, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

Increasing Adoption Of Multi-Cloud Strategy

Over the last few years, multi-cloud has become a buzzword in the technology industry. Some research indicates that 81 percent of businesses are considering or actively pursuing a multi-cloud strategy.

Each company has its own business and technical motivations for adopting a multi-cloud strategy, and they are customizing solutions to meet their unique requirements. Multi-cloud enables enterprises to deliver services across private and public clouds, allowing them to host workloads in the most appropriate location while maintaining a consistent security strategy.

Pros and Cons of a Multi-Cloud Strategy 

Businesses willing to adopt cloud infrastructure should be aware of the benefits and challenges of integrating a multi-cloud strategy:

The following are the set of benefits and challenges of adopting a multi-cloud strategy:

Benefits Of Multi-Cloud Strategy

Some of the key advantages of a multi-cloud approach include:

  •  Innovation

The flexibility to innovate quickly while taking advantage of the unique or best-in-class services that each cloud provider offers is the primary benefit of a multi-cloud strategy. This allows your developers to concentrate on innovation rather than compromising to meet the constraints of one cloud provider over another.

It’s similar to the traditional enterprise approach, in which the vendor dictates the architecture of enterprise applications through features. The ability to innovate by combining the right set of services is the most significant benefit of a multi-cloud strategy.

While all cloud providers compete to provide the best services and toolsets for everything you need, a multi-cloud strategy allows you to pick the provider and services that best suit your needs.

  •  Managing Vendor Lock-in

Using multiple cloud providers reduces your reliance on a single cloud provider.

It’s dangerous to rely on a single service provider for everything. A single provider may not be able to meet the service level requirements for a given service. A cloud provider could go out of business or turn into a competitor.

  •  Risk Mitigation

While outages are rare, they do occur and can cause significant disruption. By not putting all of your eggs in one basket, a multi-cloud strategy can help you avoid major IT disasters.To host your environment, all cloud providers have multiple geographic regions and data centres within each region.

Going multi-cloud allows you to have a separate, independent replica of your application running on another cloud provider’s infrastructure, which you can deploy if one vendor goes down.

  •  Reduced Latency

You can choose cloud regions and zones close to your customers to reduce latency and improve user experience. The faster your app responds, the shorter the distance data must travel.

Despite the fact that each cloud provider has data centres all over the world, one provider may be closer to your customers than the others. Using a combination of cloud providers to achieve faster speeds may be worth it to improve the user experience of your applications.

Challenges Of Adopting Multi-Cloud Strategy

Building and managing a multi-cloud architecture has its own set of difficulties. Some of the major concerns of implementing a multi-cloud strategy include:

  •  Cost Estimation, Optimization & Reporting

Although using multiple cloud vendors can save money, consolidating costs, chargeback, and cost estimation becomes more complex. Each cloud provider charges differently for each service, so you’ll need to understand each cloud’s pricing structure to wade through the math and draught estimates.

To efficiently manage the financial aspects of using services across multiple clouds in terms of usage and billing, Cross-account cost reporting and optimization tools are required. When transferring data between clouds, costs may be higher in some cases due to the higher costs of transferring data from one cloud to another.

  •  Talent Management 

Professionals in the cloud are in high demand. Finding developers, engineers, and security experts who are familiar with multiple clouds is nearly impossible. Cloud engineers and architects with expertise in a single cloud provider are challenging to find.

To develop on multiple cloud platforms, secure multiple infrastructures, and manage and operate multiple clouds as an organisation, you’ll need to hire the right people.

  •  Security Threats

Working with a single cloud provider allows you to take advantage of their tools and expertise to manage your app’s data security, access permissions, and compliance requirements.

When applications are distributed across multiple clouds, they become more complex and have a larger attack surface, which increases the risk of a security breach. Setting up a secure network for a single cloud with IDS/IPS, firewalls, WAF, virus protection, and incident response is difficult.

Across multiple clouds, organizations must consider how they will configure, manage, alert, log, and respond to security events. 

While the cloud revolution progresses and data volumes grow, businesses continue to rely on outdated security methods such as passwords, putting their diverse environments, remote workers, and multiple applications at risk.

Conclusion 

As businesses expand and add new applications and services to their IT environments, multi-cloud management becomes increasingly important. Using multiple cloud providers can significantly benefit businesses. You can reduce your reliance on a single provider, cherry-pick the best services, make your app faster and more resilient, and potentially reduce costs.

However, your company’s IT philosophy and maturity and your ability to make it work will influence your decision to move to a multi-cloud environment. You must weigh the benefits and drawbacks and commit to properly architect, govern, and execute in a multi-cloud environment.