Benefits of Multi-Cloud Strategies?

Why Do You Need to be Careful while Formulating Multi-cloud Strategies?

Questions about whether organizations should be utilizing cloud services are done and dusted

and well answered. As technology is evolving and almost all companies have hopped on to

become a digitally transformed organization, a concern has cropped up and that is determining

the best type of?cloud?environment. It gets quite tricky when organizations are asked to choose

between the?security?of a private cloud and the?scalability?and elasticity of a public cloud. This is

where the concept of multi-cloud comes in. Multi-cloud is slightly different from hybrid cloud. In

this model, the companies are free to choose cloud providers and avoid dependency on only

one vendor for their cloud needs. Also, they have the flexibility of choosing a cloud as per their

application or workload requirements. Furthermore, they can benefit from geographically

dispersed?clouds?and deliver amicable client experiences, irrespective of their client’s location.

After explaining the meaning of multi-cloud and shedding some light on its advantages, let’s

move on to understand its deployment in the organization. There are certain components of a

multi-cloud strategy. The first one being the selection of the cloud mix. Organizations need to

define their requirements and identify the best type of cloud and choose a vendor who will

support their growing business needs. The second component is defining the equation between

different types of cloud in business environments. Businesses need to decide how multi-cloud

will communicate with their on-premise infrastructure if there is any. The third component is

deciding the location of their?data. Based?on their data’s sensitivity, businesses will have to

decide whether to keep it in a public or a private?cloud. The last component is formulating data

access rules for different cloud types.

A multi-cloud strategy is similar to any technology strategy and therefore to receive maximum

output, businesses need to base it on their present and future requirements and their

technology stance. Some of the requirements like minimization of costs and lower IT

maintenance efforts might remain the same across different industry verticals. But the extent of

data?security, scalability, and flexibility are some of those which would largely differ across

industries. For example, for some businesses, business continuity and disaster recovery might

be of prime importance and not the scalability aspect of the?cloud.

A Multi-cloud strategy should be coined after considering certain typical factors and one of these

is if businesses are interested in utilizing open-source software or proprietary ones. The

organizations also need to decide whether they will use one platform for all their applications

and workloads or will invest in a central platform that would then be integrated with third-party

software.

Now let’s learn what are the benefits of building a multi-cloud strategy…

Improved client services

With multiple clouds and vendors providing the bandwidth for applications, there are minimal

chances of downtime. The organizations can also engage with a?cloud?service broker who will

orchestrate and manage workloads in multiple clouds and ensure optimized performance, 24*7

availability, and lower costs. A properly defined approach that defines the placement of

workloads also guarantees speed and consistency.

Heightened security position

Organizations that have a?multi-cloud?strategy in place have a strong security posture and are

less susceptible to vulnerabilities or breaches when compared to their counterparts. With varied

choices in terms of cloud types and vendors, IT teams have the flexibility of distributing the data

appropriately. They can apply strict security controls such as single sign-on or multi-factor

authentication to negate the possibilities of cybersecurity attacks.

Reduced costs

A properly crafted multi-cloud strategy explains which workload should be placed in which type

of?cloud?and enables an organization to save capital. On average, a business spends about

12% more in running workloads on an IaaS platform as compared to doing the same in their

own data centres.

Create a successful and efficient multi-cloud strategy with E2E Cloud

Building a multi-cloud strategy is not an easy feat and has some implications associated with it

as the organizations prefer to formulate technology strategies for the long term and don’t prefer

to modify for at least 5 years unless there is a major technological change. Therefore, the

building blocks of the multi-cloud strategy must be placed correctly to yield the intended results.