The Benefits of a Multi-Cloud Strategy

The reason why chess isn't as popular as other games isn’t about the game itself. It isn’t about learning the rules of the game nor it is because the board lacks colours! Instead, the reason why chess isn’t enjoyed by many is because of all the decisions we must make. If we open a move, what should we start with? We don’t know what the opposite player is going to move, how do we best react to his/her move? Should we attack or go with a defensive strategy? Each individual move has repercussions on how the end result of the game would be.

When you are moving your infrastructure to the cloud, you’re likely to face the same challenge. Some workloads would work better on cloud, but other resources might be better suited to a different cloud. Having different workloads on different clouds comprises a multi-cloud strategy-- and it is increasingly becoming popular with IT decision makers. Acording to recent survey with 650 IT decision makers, 77% of the businesses plan to leverage a multi-cloud strategy with 86% of the businesses predicting that they would need multi-cloud strategy in the next two years.

86% of enterprises predict they will need a multi-cloud approach to support their solutions within the next two years.

Benefits of a Multi-Cloud Strategy

Why should organisations adopt a multi-cloud strategy? Here are a few big benefits it offers:

1. More Options and Greater Resiliency: Amazon’s AWS offers lowest cost compute, Microsoft Azure has a strong enterprise presence and Google GCP is big on analytics and getting more value for your data. So what people want to do is get the best of everything, which means you need to move your data from one cloud to another and be able to leverage that and connect that to the compute in each cloud. With a multi-cloud strategy, you can choose which cloud platform suites your needs and work accordingly.
2. Vendor Lock-In: Moving to a cloud platform is no easy task-- nor is moving out of it! If the cloud platform where you house all of your workloads starts increasing prices or making changes that negatively affect your organisation’s performance, you might be faced choice of staying put and accepting the changes or going out of the cloud vendor with a second tough migration. Being multi-cloud will help enterprises avoid such a scenario!
3. Added Security: A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is the result of several computer systems attacking a server, website, or a cloud hosting unit that is successful when it causes a denial of service response to users. If all your resources powering your business are on one cloud, a DDoS attack can bring your business down and cause huge financial losses. With a multi-cloud approach, your company’s services become resilient against these types of attacks because even if one cloud goes down, others remain available to take the load until your service recovers.
4. Reduction in Expenditure: When you spread your cloud deployment across service providers, it creates space for competitive prices that reduce burden on your IT spending budget. In an ideal scenario, you should associate with multiple cloud providers that would help fulfil your IT requirements in a better way!
5. Cost Performance Optimization: Every cloud vendor offers different compute and storage options at different prices.  By doing a performance analysis of the workloads available in each cloud, you can project both your workload performance and TCO for compute and storage options in each cloud-- and identify the options that will meet your performance requirements at the cheapest cost!

A multi-cloud strategy allows organisations to create the best cloud solution for their business. It enables companies to take advantage of the best of what each cloud offers, minimises vendor lock-in, and provides more opportunities for optimization. A solution that helps enterprises easily adopt a multi-cloud strategy is the need of the hour - this is where vendors like Actifio come in and give you a single pane of glass to manage your data no matter where it is based in the cloud or on premise, and give you a seamless extension to attach the data to any kind of compute you want. Watch here to learn more!

If you want to learn more about how Actifio can help you realise your multi-cloud strategy goals, you can Request a Conversation with us and we will get back to you!