All aboard for the journey to the multi-cloud

Bas Burger, CEO, BT Business

When I plan a family holiday, I’m looking to create a wonderful, memorable experience.

It’s a precious time with those closest to me so I choose our destination carefully.

Having picked the location and hotel, I think about the journey. As my kids have grown and moved out of the family home, I need to take account of our multiple locations. This adds complexity but it’s essential I get it right.

The journey is critical. It won’t be a memorable holiday if the experience is ruined by delayed and cancelled flights — or an airline that loses our luggage. ?

It’s an analogy that fits well with the cloud.

Cloud providers such as AWS are fantastic hosts for your organisation’s workloads and data. They have a choice of locations around the world and offer great value and flexibility in the services they offer. They manage, secure and monitor their cloud environment to deliver the optimum performance for customers. It’s a perfect destination for your digital journey.

However, users of your organisation’s apps and digital services can only enjoy the best experience if you have end-to-end visibility and control of the routes their data and workloads take as they cross your network and into the cloud.

This isn’t as simple as it seems because how your organisation operates has fundamentally changed.

Like a family when kids leave home, your people are now everywhere. They’re on the move, in the office or at customer or partner sites. You’ve more devices to connect and they’re everywhere too — from office IT to machines on factory floors. You might even be tracking goods and materials in transit. The complexity just keeps on growing.

Taking my holiday analogy further still, how about a world tour?

Now, we have multiple starting points and multiple destinations. There are border restrictions to comply with and maybe some territories we’d rather avoid. If we’re taking a road-trip, we’ll want to consider back-up. The amount of route planning, travel information and real-time updates needed is becoming unmanageable for all but a specialist few. ??

This is more like a modern, multi-cloud environment.

Users are everywhere, devices are everywhere and you’re using multiple clouds in different countries and jurisdictions. You’re now facing challenges such as data sovereignty, consistency of global user experience, resilience across international routes and cyber security compatibilities. ?

In the meantime, the criticality of your workloads is increasing as more and more of your operations switch to digital. If your network fails or is compromised anywhere in your software supply chain, it’s no longer just an inconvenience to an office-based few. Critical operations from manufacturing to payments may fail, seriously damaging your organisation, customers and community. You may face regulatory action too.

Traditional approaches to connectivity are no longer good enough.

You need a holistic view and control of your global multi-cloud network. This demands a network footprint giving you access to top cloud destinations around the world, high levels of automation — because of volume and complexity — new “zero trust” approaches to security — because with complexity comes risk — and resilience. And you need all of this, everywhere and in real-time. ??

When designing new apps or workloads, continue this holistic approach: include your secure networks, cloud and application development teams to get the optimum results. Only if they all work together tightly, can they deliver the overall performance and user experience your organisation expects.

Next week, I’m travelling to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a city that is also a top holiday destination. I’ll be talking to customers and partners such as AWS about addressing the multi-cloud challenge. If you’re going too, I wish you a safe and pleasant trip!