Enterprises to Implement Multi-Cloud Strategy!
When it comes to cloud computing, there is always a hype in industry around it. Cloud adoption is well established in enterprises by now. Where, small or large enterprise they all know the benefits of adopting cloud service as a norm. while the enterprises swear by the benefits of the cloud, they are acknowledging the further added advantages that multi-cloud can offer. One of the biggest advantage multi-cloud strategy offers to the enterprises is to get rid of vendor lock-in. Today, enterprises do not want them to be solely relying all their IT Landscape of single vendor. Data independence, increased redundancy, controlled cost are few more added advantages for enterprise by adopting multi-cloud strategy.
It is important for us to understand the difference between Cloud environment and distinguish between them.
Multi-cloud Vs Hybrid Environment: Most of the time, we have seen that the multi-cloud is often linked with Hybrid Cloud. However, they both are totally different. Putting multi-cloud into a simple words, it is all about putting your workloads across multiple cloud providers and sharing the workloads among each other as a service which are flexible, scalable, manageable and cost-effective for an enterprise. Hybrid Cloud: A hybrid cloud is a mix of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud services with orchestration between the two parties. In this case, organizations utilize the best of both the worlds-private and public cloud.
Single Vs Multi-cloud environment: Single cloud environment refers to when an enterprise rendered all services from a single provider. All cloud services such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS are availed from single provider like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. On the other hand, Multi-cloud environment: the enterprises render best of services from different cloud providers by assessing their core services and strong sides. For example, Lambda a Serverless services from AWS and Kubernetes Orchestration managed services from Google Cloud.
Public Vs Private Cloud: A private cloud is computing services offered over the internet or on private network. Most of the times, enterprises take advantage of private cloud over public as same is guide by their stringent compliance and security principles. Private cloud offers additional advantage of security and privacy through private firewalls. Here with private cloud, enterprises take manageability control of data-center, rack space themselves. Public Cloud: A public cloud is a computing service where the provider makes the resources available to the public via the internet. This type of cloud service is quite popular amongst businesses of all types as it provides quick access to new products and services, without having to take care of their setup and maintenance.
Why Multi-Cloud Adoption?
Making a choice between varied cloud environments simply trust on the enterprise needs. Startups and SMEs who have just started offering their business can rely on single cloud provider considering that the manageability and maintenance is easy and have limited workloads.
However, when the business extends where their offerings needs to further strengthen on other services, they can explore more offerings from different providers and built their multi-cloud strategy and adoption.
High Resiliency: every individual cloud provider has its own strengths and weaknesses. Amazon AWS has the lowest compute cost, Azure is strong in enterprise presence and Google GCP is strong with his analytics offerings. Opting multi-cloud means there is a flexibility to choose from a vast variety of services as per your further business needs.
Vendor Lock-in: this is one of the most buzzing need for any enterprise who does not want to have a vendor lock-in today. In general, enterprises do not want to have any restrictions on them towards technology, services which are developed by a vendor or a partner. Adopting multi-cloud strategy saves enterprise from vendor lock-in situations.
Data Independent: enterprises are adopting digital transformations heavily, which produces large amount of data for enterprises in current state. To protect customer data from breaches and meeting their compliance needs, multi-cloud adoption enables enterprises a flexibility to meet their compliance and regulatory requirements.
Cost Saving: One of the major driver for enterprises to think through the multi-cloud offerings is cost savings. When adopting a multi-cloud strategy there is an opportunity to compare service prices by each service provider and choose the most optimal cost.
Architecture: today most of the modern applications are built up on microservice architecture which leverages advantage from containers. With Kubernetes, things become much simpler to run and manage application on public cloud service or any combination of public and private cloud. This empowers enterprises to have a right strategy of managing the workloads and understand the right workload for their set of applications. This enables enterprises to avoid vendor lock-in and getting the right features, best fit and leveraging their migration strategy and realizes more ROI from IT Investments.
Flexibility And Scalability: With a competent multi-cloud adoption, enterprises can now scale their storage up or down based on their requirements. A multi-cloud environment is a perfect place for the storage of data with proper automation as well as real-time syncing. Based on the requirements of individual data segments, businesses can depend on multiple cloud vendors specifically.
Check out Gartner’s first Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs), which “enable organizations to manage multicloud (i.e., private and public cloud) services and resources”.
Conclusion:
Most Enterprises choose to work with multiple cloud providers, for a host of different reasons. For an enterprise using cloud services across multiple geographies, finding just one public cloud infrastructure provider to meet its needs is a struggle. In organizations like this, the decision to use a multi-cloud strategy is clear and becoming a norm for enterprises.
