Go Cloud Agnostic.

Multi cloud architectures that utilize public, private and hybrid cloud services can be a smart investment strategy for many businesses, especially mid-market and enterprise-level organizations. With the strategic distribution of your cloud management tasks between multiple providers, multi cloud adoption can help achieve greater efficiencies, take advantage of the economies of scale and establish the resilient performance of your virtual infrastructure. Furthermore, operating workloads with more than one cloud provider also paves the way for a?Cloud Agnostic?approach. Being cloud-agnostic means you can switch workloads to a different public cloud provider when the need arises, with minimal disruption to your business. Some would say cloud agnostic is the way to go, while others might disagree.

Here are the pros and cons of a cloud-agnostic approach and strategies enterprises should consider for becoming cloud agnostic;

1. Ability to Find the Best-in-Class Multi Cloud Providers

When incorporating multiple clouds into a company's IT strategy, administrators are able to line up their business requirements with the best cloud-hosting providers for each individual task. For example, you can select a cloud provider based on its high upload speed while another provider can guarantee more favorable Service Level Agreement terms. By having multiple options, users can achieve a high level of agility and match each part of their business to a specific provider's setup and execution terms. Instead of bending your processes to accommodate a provider's requirements, you have the freedom to access multiple options, each offering the best match for different parts of your business.

2. Competitive Pricing

As the number of multi cloud providers grows, they form a competitive market that strives to offer optimal pricing for different resource capacities while remaining attractive to the majority of the cloud users. With this in mind, organizations can now enjoy the freedom of comparing different providers and securing the best available rates based on their specific IT needs. And since you are not limited to any single cloud provider's terms, you can select the best vendor based on its offerings such as payment flexibility, adjustable contracts, customizable capacity and other important elements.

3. Agility

Planning a multi cloud strategy is not an easy task. Many traditional companies still struggle with legacy IT systems, on-premise structures and hardware suppliers. They are often limited in their ability to orchestrate multi cloud operations on their own, therefore, seek out competent service providers who are expected to deliver the necessary expertise for adopting multi cloud infrastructures. With the right expertise at hand, you will be able to achieve complete agility and workload mobility between heterogeneous cloud platforms, storage and hypervisors.

4. Bolstered Resilience

A multi cloud arrangement can also help protect a company's critical business applications and data by offering redundant backup and recovery capabilities that provide business continuity when an emergency strikes, whether caused by a failed disk, power outage or natural disaster. Adding a multi cloud piece to your disaster recovery strategy provides a much-needed level of reliability and security by offering an ability to replicate your resources in a cloud region away from the disaster area.

5. Flexibility and Scalability

With?90% of the world's data?being created in the past two years alone, multi cloud offers a perfect place to process and store information with proper automation and real-time syncs. multi cloud is a perfect solution not only for storage but also for scalability as it allows businesses to scale their storage up or down based on an ongoing demand. Ideally, multi cloud providers work seamlessly together so organizations can invest in any level of space, security and protection based on the needs of each data segment.

6. Robust Security

Since cloud?providers are responsible for the security of their own infrastructures, they can ensure that your organization has all the capabilities necessary for protecting your data as well. Make sure you thoroughly understand how all entities in your cloud environment are compatible with the cloud applications at your disposal. The security of your network must be assessed on the regular basis as your infrastructure and software change over time.

7. Network Performance Improvements

multi-cloud interconnection allows you to create a high-speed, low-latency infrastructure while reducing the cost of integrating clouds with your existing IT system. By enabling enterprises to extend their networks to multiple providers, a multi cloud approach leverages proximity and uses fast, low-latency connections to significantly improve application response time while providing a better user experience. A highly optimized interconnection can only be achieved through faster, private links between multiple cloud service providers.

8. Enhanced Risk Management

Risk management is another great perk that comes with adopting a multi cloud strategy. If one vendor happens to have an infrastructure meltdown or an attack, a multi cloud user can quickly switch to another cloud service provider or back up to a private cloud. multi cloud providers can mitigate risk by employing redundant, independent systems that offer?robust?authentication mechanisms, vulnerability testing and API assets consolidation. But ultimately, the only way to ensure a robust risk management system is to implement a multi-layered security approach.

9. Avoiding Vendor Lock-in

Many companies are familiar with vendor lock-in from dealing with traditional enterprise companies like Oracle. When organizations enter into a relationship with a cloud service provider without carefully evaluating rules related to costs and add-ons first, they quickly realize that certain terms and conditions can't be changed.?By carefully evaluating the expectations and potential pitfalls, and having a strong negotiating position which makes it easy to switch from one cloud provider to another, companies can harness the power of the cloud and get the most value out of their partnership with any cloud service provider.

10. Drives Innovation

Through automating the multi cloud management process, companies can effectively coordinate disparate workloads, manage hybrid workflows and integrate the DevOps processes to drive innovation. Automation ensures efficient orchestration of data, applications and infrastructure across multiple cloud environments. It expands deployment capabilities by connecting applications and workflow processes to quickly deliver business services.

Cloud Agnostic: CONS

As businesses continue to diversify and intensify their digital transformation efforts, the multi-cloud reality is bound to expand further. While multi-cloud infrastructure is becoming more popular, users of multi-cloud environments encounter obstacles, including integration, data migration and data recovery, workload mapping, and security and compliance issues.

Here are some of the disadvantages of using multi-cloud environments:

• Complexity with Integration: Being cloud-agnostic sounds excellent on paper, but the realities of its implementation usually are much more difficult without the right support. If the right service and solution providers are not chosen, the enterprise may incur unexpected complexity and cost when creating a cloud strategy with portability built-in from the ground up.
• Working to the lowest common denominator: When you have a specific feature requirement, there is a small risk that the dependent feature works only on one cloud platform. Even if Microsoft Azure or AWS has a new feature or service to offer for your business, you may still be reluctant to use it unless there is a guarantee that you can replicate or implement the same in Google Cloud. For some companies this may not be a real drawback, but it is certainly something to be aware of and consider.

Thus, multi-cloud environments offer many pros, but also some significant cons.?As a result, managing multiple clouds is now a top priority for CIOs and IT leaders: a recent Gartner report indicates managing multiple and hybrid clouds is now considered a mission-critical business in cloud deployments.

A cloud-agnostic, cloud-native solution serves as a one-stop shop for all needs on multi-cloud. The cloud agnostic solution providers help enterprises through the entire journey of multi-cloud right from selection, integration, implementation to visualize & manage, enabling them to scale-up their overall business and operational efficiency. Cloud agnostic providers can closely measure every cloud asset or service's performance and offerings, irrespective of the provider or technology.

Here are some of?the key strategies for enterprises seeking a cloud-agnostic approach:

1. Managed Databases: a major strategy for being cloud agnostic is to use managed database services. Nowadays, most public cloud offerings include managed database installs, maintains, management, and access to a database. The major public clouds such as AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure all offer defined possibilities and services for migrating databases between providers.
2. Use Containerization: Container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes are invaluable to the modern cloud. Essentially, a container as a software unit can package the source code together with its libraries, runtimes, and dependencies, which, in turn, allows the application to be ported from one cloud environment to another without any conflict.
3. Automation: Regular tasks, such as application deployment and performance management, logging, and monitoring, to name a few, are very time-consuming and involved in a diverse multi-cloud environment. But this is also the key to becoming cloud-neutral and agnostic.?Automation of these tasks can help.
4. Security through a single pane of glass: Data and applications in a multi-cloud scenario are distributed across a range of platforms, technology stacks, and hardware components both physical (legacy, on-premises IT) and virtualized (DC or Cloud). As security policies are different and specific to every system and organization, uniformly applying policies is challenging. A single dashboard view can address the key concern of mismatched security policies and uncertainty in enforcement associated with the multi-cloud scenario.
5. Simplified Migration techniques: Migration of on-premise workloads to a cloud platform is a complicated and time-consuming process that requires multiple skill sets and resources. In a multi-cloud environment, the migration needs to be across different cloud platforms or infrastructure (public, private, virtual private), which adds further complexity.?Simplified migration techniques exist to address these issues.
6. Agile/Rapid Development and Deployment: An agnostic cloud management solution can be a game-changer for companies that work using Agile approaches or who otherwise move rapidly. It helps enterprises re-use policies and services across the entire multi-cloud environment, simplifying and standardizing the deployment process and offering consistency in performance and security.
7. Use of Open standards: Use of open standards, infrastructure provisioning tools, and configuration management tools are vital to being cloud-agnostic.
8. Quality of the service?provider: Ignoring multi-cloud is no longer an option. Adopting an enterprise-grade vendor-agnostic cloud solution provider can be a critical right step towards tapping into the benefits of multi-cloud mitigating the challenges and risks. The strategy is to opt for the right provider with a strong partnership with all leading cloud service providers for maximum benefits and services. Ideally, the service provider should be capable of managing multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud scenarios using a single dashboard. It must allow an enterprise to run all workloads on various clouds, including public clouds, hosted private clouds, and on-premises servers, while managing them through a "single pane of glass".