The shift towards cloud computing has transformed the way organizations store and manage data, as well as how they deliver their cloud consulting services to customers. As businesses continue to adopt cloud-based technologies, many are turning to multi-cloud strategies as a way to maximize the benefits of cloud computing. Multi-cloud is a strategy that involves using multiple cloud providers to distribute workloads and applications across different platforms. This approach offers several advantages over relying on a single cloud provider, including improved resilience, cost optimization, and access to specialized services. In this article, we will explore why multi-cloud has become an increasingly popular strategy among organizations, and discuss its benefits for businesses looking to optimize their cloud computing operations.
To find the answer, we must first examine recent technological history.
The cloud was born, not from IT necessity, but from the needs of business. Various lines of business (LOBs) required specific types of support that IT couldn’t provide, primarily because the IT budget was completely consumed by day-to-day operations.
Those early types of support included sales force automation, CRM, human resources, marketing automation, and supply chain management services. To remain competitive in changing times, LOBs needed to enable or improve automation of these operations. Many LOBs used their own budgets to take control of the situation. They turned to software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers for assistance, as well as integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) providers to connect SaaS offerings with on-premises data sources. This pattern of ad hoc outsourcing accelerated, sometimes without enterprise IT’s knowledge. LOBs were the first to push the organisation into a multi-cloud environment.
IT organisations have also unintentionally created the environment for multi-cloud infrastructure. They began spinning up compute and storage services from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers and looked into PaaS offerings from early public cloud services to accelerate software development and testing. These strategies are still widely used today. It was simply easier and faster to provision services online rather than spin up a development environment in the corporate data centre. None of this was part of a grand cloud strategy. It was simply a reality, driven by need and basic economics.
What Is a Multi-Cloud Strategy?
Multi-cloud strategy refers to the use of more than one cloud service (multiple cloud services) from two or more vendors. Companies use a multi-cloud strategy to distribute computing resources for the various services they offer in order to reduce the risk of downtime and data loss.
The Benefits and Drawbacks of a Multi-Cloud Strategy
It provides numerous advantages, including agility, scalability, redundancy, and cost-effectiveness. With its increasing popularity, decision-makers must know about the advantages and disadvantages of adopting a multi-cloud strategy.
Pros
- Lock-in risk reduction-Minimizes dependency on a single vendor
- Take advantage of the most recent and best services that meet your company’s requirements.
- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
- Workload optimisation
- Agility in addressing new business needs.
- Time-to-market reduction.
Cons
- Managing multiple providers increases operational complexity
- Monitoring in the cloud-native world is complicated.
- Network latency issues and bandwidth consumption
- Intercloud integration costs
- Needs management overhead
Why is Multi-Cloud Strategy the Future of Enterprise?
Higher ROI
Each cloud has a unique set of features, functionalities, pricing models/policies, and other elements. The fast-changing enterprise IT landscape makes predicting the best fit for your apps and business needs difficult. Rather than relying on a single cloud provider, the multi-cloud model approach gives businesses multiple options for selecting the service provider that best fits their business use case. Deploying applications across multiple clouds provides agility, dependability, flexibility, and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) — all of which contribute to increased ROI.
Enhanced Security
The primary concern that prevents industry laggards from adopting cloud computing is losing control over mission-critical apps and data. The promising solution is an on-premises private environment that provides businesses with granular control, transparency, and complete visibility into IT resources. A multi-cloud environment enables them to maintain a hybrid approach that combines security and cost savings. For example, the most secure operations are kept in the private cloud, while consistent business data and apps are run on cost-effective public cloud networks.
High Speed and Minimal Latency
Access to data and applications stored at a greater distance across the network takes longer. Minor delays occur when data traffic travels across multiple cloud nodes before reaching end users. Latency is an inherent limitation in cloud computing delivered from servers installed in different locations. The multi-cloud infrastructure can select the data centre closest to end users to send requested data with the fewest network hops.
Improved Resilience and Availability
With multiple cloud providers, organizations can distribute their workload and data across different platforms, reducing the risk of downtime due to a single point of failure. This provides improved resilience and availability of services.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the multi-cloud strategy has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its numerous benefits for organizations. By leveraging multiple cloud providers, businesses can avoid vendor lock-in, improve resilience and availability, optimize cost and performance, access specialized services, and meet compliance and regulatory requirements. As the demand for digital transformation and cloud-based services continues to grow, multi-cloud strategies are likely to become even more prevalent in the future, as organizations seek to achieve greater flexibility and efficiency in their operations.
