Multi-cloud Strategy

As organisations are taking a step to modernize & digitalize their traditional workloads, the cloud has played one of the crucial roles in attaining scalability and performance. ‘Cloud first’ and ‘Cloud native’ now appear more frequently in enterprise growth and digital transformation strategies. The rise of cloud adoption has also made businesses move towards leveraging multi-cloud strategy. The Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report suggest that “enterprises have almost entirely embraced multi-cloud; 92 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy; 80 percent have a hybrid cloud strategy”.

What is Multi-cloud?
Multi-cloud is a strategy where an organization leverages two or more cloud computing platforms to perform various tasks. It comprises public, private, and edge clouds to achieve the enterprise’s end goals. Generally, organisations do not want to depend on a single cloud provider and may choose to use resources from several providers to get the best benefits from each unique service. Multi-cloud is about exploiting the unique capabilities of different clouds, rather than going ‘all in’ with a single cloud.

Hybrid cloud vs Multi-cloud
A hybrid cloud is not a multi-cloud, though a multi-cloud may include hybrid architecture. A hybrid cloud refers to the connection between a private cloud and a public cloud. This model is essentially used for securing sensitive data within an on-site cloud solution - or within a privately hosted cloud. A hybrid solution relies on a private data centre and leverages the advanced computing resources of a public cloud solution. On the other hand, a multi-cloud strategy can include a hybrid architecture but relies on more than one public cloud. An organization can select to store user data on-site, leveraging one cloud provider for IaaS and another for SaaS. Some cloud environments have tailored usage for specific use cases, which prompts IT stakeholders, to select a particular cloud service provider for specific business functions.

Benefits of Multi-cloud architecture
There are various reasons for enterprises to choose a multi-cloud environment. Each benefit associated can prove instrumental in establishing or maintaining a competitive advantage in today’s digital economy. Some of them are:

• Mitigating Vendor Lock-in: By remaining vendor-neutral, you can pick and choose what suits you and select the best tool for the job. It reduces dependency on a single provider for the complete solution.
• Optimized ROI: With a multi-cloud strategy, it is easy to choose a cloud platform that is most suitable for the business and technical demands. The multi-cloud strategy offers a rich set of cloud options to solve rigorous needs across a diverse range of computing and business functions, thereby optimizing returns on cloud investments.
• Competitive pricing: The multi-cloud strategy offers organizations to benefit from the best available rates offered by different cloud providers based on their specific IT needs.
• Advanced security: Multi-cloud infrastructure allows organizations to maintain strict security compliance while optimizing computing resources. Like a hybrid cloud environment, it also enables a combination of security and cost savings at the same time.
• Better Disaster recovery: The likelihood of concurrent downtime across multiple cloud vendors is extremely low. Cloud service providers have impressive service level agreements that protect their clients against downtime. By leveraging two or more of these services, the risk of disaster decreases significantly.

Challenges using Multi-cloud
With all the advantages gained with a multi-cloud approach, organizations should also be aware of its downsides. Some of the considerable challenges for multi-cloud strategy include:

• Increased Management: The more cloud environments your organization uses, the more complex the management task becomes. Each public cloud provider has its own platform and unique processes, which makes the management of multiple cloud environments difficult for the IT department. Multiplying vendors means multiplying the management overhead.
• Skill gap: The deployment of a new multi-cloud platform forces IT heads to retrain staff to learn new skills across multiple cloud providers. As business needs and goals rapidly change, it’s hard for enterprises to find staff with multi-cloud skills.
• Data sharing: Multi-cloud can often cause difficulty with synchronizing and sharing data, as different cloud providers have different maturity levels. It can result in issues associated with data sharing over multiple platforms.
• Cost control: One of the advantages of multi-cloud is the ability to provide a “self-service” experience, i.e., the ability to deploy applications in any cloud provider of choice. Unfortunately, the billing process, in this case, becomes cumbersome as each cloud provider uses different billing systems and employs a variety of pricing, fee, and infrastructure sizing models.

Final thoughts
The recent Gartner survey of public cloud users suggests that there will be a significant rise in multi-cloud adoption, therefore the enterprises need to consider both the advantages and challenges to fully benefit from the multi-cloud strategy. Careful planning and thought are required to achieve consistent and effective security & compliance and the use of additional tools and management platforms. Hence taking a step back now and developing a multi-cloud strategy will ensure organizations deliver the promised business benefits of the cloud as quickly as possible.

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