Organizations are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies and multi-cloud solutions. By adopting multi-cloud, enterprises can run applications where needed without adding complexity.
Multi-cloud results from enterprises using cloud computing services from at least two cloud providers to run their applications. This environment allows organizations to be private, public, or a combination of the two models.
What is a multi-cloud strategy?
When implementing a multi-cloud strategy, the aim is to give your organization the flexibility to operate with the best computing environment for each workload. A multi-cloud strategy entails selecting cloud services from multiple providers to meet unique business needs and accomplish specific tasks.
By utilizing several cloud platforms, organizations can access more choices for cloud infrastructure and solutions, geographic service locations, pricing models, and technological innovations. Multi-cloud allows you to draw on the strengths of different providers to maximize your cloud benefits, such as enhanced scalability, flexibility, agility, and security.
This approach also provides redundancy and helps ensure resiliency by spreading workloads across various cloud service providers, thus reducing the impact of any potential outages or service disruptions that can arise from any single provider.
Hybrid cloud vs. private cloud vs. public cloud
To understand multi-cloud, one must first understand the differences between public, private, and hybrid clouds.
Public cloud is where an organization obtains cloud services over the internet from a third-party cloud provider, often on a pay-per-usage basis. These third-party providers offer products and services, such as storage, networking, data, analytics, app development, containers, and AI solutions.
Private cloud is a computing model that consists of dedicated cloud resources and infrastructure that are exclusively delivered to a single organization. These services can be delivered over the Internet or on-premises through an organization’s private internal network. Through private clouds, organizations can gain greater control, customization, and security than public clouds, however, they may require more internal IT resources to manage and maintain than public clouds.
Hybrid cloud combines an organization’s on-premises private cloud with public cloud offerings from a third-party provider. With a hybrid cloud infrastructure, business data, and apps can travel between public and private cloud consistently. Additionally, organizations may choose a hybrid cloud approach to maximize the performance and value of their IT investments.
Benefits for organizations to adopt multi-cloud
By utilizing multi-cloud architectures, businesses can achieve greater efficiencies, take advantage of the economies of scale, and establish the resilient performance of their virtual infrastructures.
Some of the various benefits of beginning the multi-cloud journey include:
- Finding the best-in-class multi-cloud providers– With multiple options, users can achieve a high level of agility and match each part of their business to a specific provider’s setup, offering the freedom to access multiple options and the best match for different parts of your business.
- Competitive pricing– A competitive market of multi-cloud providers can create optimal pricing for different resource capacities. Organizations can compare cloud providers and secure the best available rates based on their IT needs.
- Agility– With the right multi-cloud expertise, organizations can achieve agility and workload mobility between cloud platforms.
- Bolstered resilience– Through a multi-cloud environment, a company’s critical business applications and data can be protected through backup redundancies and recovery capabilities that provide business continuity when emergencies strike, such as power outages or natural disasters.
- Flexibility and scalability– Multi-cloud offers a place to process and store information with proper automation and real-time syncs. Not only is it great for storage, but it also allows for scalability by businesses to scale their storage up or down based on ongoing demand.
- Robust security– Cloud providers are responsible for the security of their infrastructures, providing a secure environment for businesses to protect their data.
- Network performance improvements– Multi-cloud environments help generate a high-speed, low-latency infrastructure while reducing the cost of integrating clouds with existing IT systems. Multi-cloud approaches leverage proximity and use fast, low-latency connections to significantly improve application response time while providing an improved user experience.
- Enhanced risk management– Should one vendor 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. Through enhanced risk management, multi-cloud providers can employ redundant, independent systems that offer robust authentication mechanisms, vulnerability testing, and API assets consolidation.
- Drives innovation– Organizations can effectively coordinate disparate workloads, manage hybrid workflows, and integrate the DevOps processes to drive innovation. Multi-cloud can ensure efficient orchestration of data, applications, and infrastructure across multiple cloud environments.
Challenges with multi-cloud
While there are plenty of benefits to implementing a multi-cloud architecture, cloud management isn’t without its challenges.
Among the challenges that enterprises can face when adopting multi-cloud include:
- Growing cloud costs: Deploying and signing up for a growing number of cloud apps and service providers can increase spending. It’s important to compare cloud providers to secure the best rates.
- Legacy security concerns: When migrating to cloud environments, a significant challenge can be how cloud integrates with legacy systems. Without efficient management, multi-cloud environments can create massive issues for businesses.
- Data privacy and protection: Multi-cloud requires housing data in various locations and in multiple data centers and cloud environments, which can increase security concerns. MSPs need to assess their networks, environments, and security architectures prior to implementing multi-cloud to avoid any potential risks and liabilities.
- Rapid changes in arrangements: As an increasing number of cloud apps are added to their IT environments, organizations risk losing control of identity processes, access management, and security. MSPs must oversee and stay up-to-date on their cloud applications without significantly increasing spending on cloud management tools.
- Specialist management expertise: Specific expertise is necessary to ensure an organization’s IT environment remains operational and secure. Without efficient management, multi-cloud environments can create significant issues for businesses.
How MSPs can implement a multi-cloud strategy
When implementing a multi-cloud strategy, MSPs should keep a few best practices in mind to ensure the adoption goes as smoothly as possible and to maximize the benefits of cloud assets.
For starters, MSPs must clearly define the objectives and strategy that align with their business goals. Much like the adoption of other technologies, MSPs must identify their specific reasons for adopting a multi-cloud strategy to help guide decision-making throughout the adoption process.
Another best practice when implementing a multi-cloud strategy is developing a comprehensive architecture. This architecture considers the interoperability and portability of apps and data among the various cloud platforms your organization can use. MSPs can ensure seamless integration and data transfer across their multi-cloud by emphasizing standardization and compatibility.
MSPs should also take advantage of automation and orchestration tools, which will help them ensure streamlined business operations and manage workloads efficiently across multiple clouds. Utilizing these tools can enable automated provisioning, scaling, and resource management to boost performance and minimize human errors.
Implementing robust security measures across every layer of their multi-cloud infrastructure. By employing encryption, access controls, identity management, and regular security audits, MSPs can safeguard sensitive data and apps across all cloud environments.
Lastly, MSPs should practice continuous monitoring and management to enhance security and agility when implementing a multi-cloud strategy. These proactive measures help MSPs make any necessary adjustments before a problem arises and meet performance metrics.
Bottom line: The time is right to consider multi-cloud
Organizations are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies and multi-cloud solutions to run applications where they need them and without added complexity. These solutions, built on top of open-source technologies, offer flexibility and portability to migrate, build, and optimize applications.
With so many different tools available to organizations and the vast amounts of data they have to maintain, enterprises should adopt a multi-cloud strategy. This approach can benefit businesses that rely on the cloud for critical parts of their IT infrastructure.
MSPs have increasingly become guides for transitioning organizations from traditional data centers to the cloud. Read more about why your MSP should offer multi-cloud services.