Making multi-cloud work for you: A resilient and efficient infrastructure is key

Cloud technology is an incredible opportunity for any business, and it has become a cornerstone of modern IT infrastructures. But still, companies underestimate the risk of #cloudconcentration and rely too much on a single cloud provider. This is a path toward great risk and should be avoided. Instead, it’s vital for a company to pursue a multi-cloud strategy that lives up to modern standards. What you want as an enterprise is secure, reliable, and efficient communication between multiple clouds – with low latency and high throughput. If variety is the spice of life, then a multi-cloud architecture provides you with a lot of opportunities to spice up your business and put it on an acceleration path. But let’s start from the beginning.

In my conversations with business and IT leaders, I sometimes get that déjà vu of “one cloud works just fine and is all I need”: some organizations happen to have many – far too many – workloads, databases, and apps all concentrated in one single cloud environment. But let’s face it: the exclusive use of one #cloudprovider may become a single point of failure – outages of cloud service providers are not unheard of, making headlines somewhere in the world on a regular basis. In the past, enterprises have weighed up the convenience of a single cloud and the potential risk that goes with it against the complexity of a more resilient multi-cloud approach. The good news is that the complexity of managing multi-cloud has reduced significantly.

This is where interconnection comes into play: the successful use and integration of multiple cloud providers is underpinned by resilient connectivity. Modern interconnection services offer a remarkable solution. They provide direct connectivity with shorter pathways and much better controllability. In addition, this enables lower latency and faster response times. Imagine the performance of your business applications improving significantly as your enterprise is connecting to various clouds directly via interconnection platforms and Cloud Exchanges. The DE-CIX Cloud ROUTER, for example, makes cloud #interconnection much easier as it allows direct and private high performance data exchange between cloud environments. If, for example, an enterprise is using a retail solution with one cloud provider and a business intelligence solution with another, it can route traffic directly between public and/or private clouds and benefit from improved application performance as well as increased security and protection against cyberattacks.

For global companies another aspect of mitigating cloud concentration risk is to connect to clouds in geographically independent data center locations, in alignment with compliance requirements, of course. The ecosystem around a distributed IX provides great opportunities for resilience, as enterprises can connect to cloud on-ramps from multiple geographically separated data center locations – also remotely, to cloud on-ramps in different cloud regions, for even greater resilience. A distributed data center and cloud approach is clearly an asset. Enterprises rely on a high-performance infrastructure with fast data access for applications and data-intensive computations. This is especially important in industries that demand the best quality and industry-leading SLAs, like finance, automotive and manufacturing.

Do away with silos

Silo – the bad word that no one likes to hear, but almost all companies have a silo here and there. However, connecting to and sourcing services from multiple clouds is easier said than done! More and more organizations aim to run workloads and applications across multiple clouds. This means leaping over the silo hurdle and providing a resilient and fast layer of interoperability between clouds so that data and apps can be used seamlessly. In this area, there is still a lot of potential for enterprises to optimize and enhance their current architectures and tools.

The best option to achieve this goal is to use a cloud routing service on the Interconnection platform, like the DE-CIX Cloud ROUTER, to directly connect your chosen clouds with each other. Such a concept has several remarkable advantages over the traditional method of connecting to each cloud individually. With a cloud routing service, data can be synchronized between clouds directly on the Interconnection platform, without a long and cost-intensive journey back to the company’s own infrastructure. The result is that applications and data behave as if they were in a single cloud environment, with the lowest latency and seamless interaction. This, in turn, dramatically simplifies and fortifies the design of a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.

Easy resilience with the multi-provider approach

Fortunately, there is an accessible way to simplify this process: by using a data center and carrier neutral interconnection platform, like those operated world-wide by DE-CIX. With the help of the DE-CIX platform, companies can design a geographically distributed and resilient set-up. For example, they can ensure redundant connections to multiple clouds from physically separated data center locations, and all connections can then be managed easily through the platform’s portal and API. So, as we can see, an enhanced IT infrastructure is achievable for every company!

These are not only theoretical considerations but very practical ones, born out of our daily work and experience at DE-CIX. A high-performance carrier and data center neutral interconnection platform is the architecture of choice that makes businesses more resilient and enables them to harness the power of digitalization for their future.