Simple bytes—Multi-Cloud Strategy: Good or Bad?

One of my clients laughed at my expected response to his question: “Is multi-cloud strategy a good strategy?” As you may have guessed, my response was “it depends.” In my mind, this question is like “Should I eat 1400 calories every day?” Of course, it depends. It depends on your height, weight, metabolism, your fitness and nutrition baseline, requirements, and goals. What could be beneficial for one person may be catastrophic for another.

The public cloud marketplace is dominated by three key vendors: AWS, Microsoft, and GCP. In the early days of cloud adoption, enterprises typically picked one horse to bet on. To hedge their bets, avoid risks, and control costs, some followed the hybrid cloud strategy and managed some data center footprint. With the maturity of cloud abstraction and aggregation technologies, businesses have been letting go of their data centers and private cloud in favor of using multiple clouds.

So, what are the good and bad of this multi-cloud trend?

The good

1.?????Flexibility:?You get to avoid vendor lock-in and gain the flexibility of evolving your architecture that is decoupled from a single vendor roadmap.

2.?????Use the best-of-breed services:?Different cloud vendors have different strengths. Being able to use the best of each service will allow for the strongest solutions.

3.?????More Robust Business Continuity options:?Every major cloud vendor offers good business continuity options, but if you want to protect yourself for every event, using a multi-cloud business continuity strategy may be the way to go.

4.?????More geographic coverage allows for better latency and compliance: Cloud vendors have a footprint in different parts of the world. For your global audience, you may need to combine multiple vendors to offer minimum latency. Additionally, there is a consideration for regulatory requirements like GDPR that may give you more options.?

The bad

1.?????Cost:?The complexity of cloud cost management across multiple clouds may drive costs higher.?

2.?????Talent:?While cloud fundamentals are generally the same, the specific skillset required to utilize vendor-specific services is hardly transferable.

3.?????Security Complexity:?Monitoring and hardening your assets across cloud providers will require additional investments.

Net-net, the choice between simplicity and elegant complexity is not straightforward. I hope some of the considerations listed above will help evaluate your options. If I can be of assistance, please reach out.

It is my passion to help explain complex topics in simple terms. If you have ideas on what you would like to hear about next, please let me know.