What is a multicloud strategy? It involves the use of two or more cloud services providers, rather than one. If you’ve already taken the step into hybrid cloud – which involves mixing public and private IT resources – you know that a blended IT approach yields cost, operational and performance benefits.
Multicloud involves applying the same strategic thinking, but just to your cloud. You take a selective approach to cloud deployment, picking and choosing “best-of-breed” service providers to handle certain aspects of your cloud strategy. Here’s why that pays off.
Why Should I Consider a Multicloud Strategy?
Early cloud adopters started with a pretty simple equation: one application in the cloud, with one provider. As their cloud presences grew, many of these companies chose to stay with the same provider for every new application. That might have made sense in the early days of cloud, when there weren’t many options.
That’s no longer the case.
There are tons of cloud service providers addressing different use cases. Yes, there are different companies depending on your cloud model, including Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers. But, there are even nuances within and beyond those models.
For example, there are tons of IaaS providers out there, and each one varies in terms of cost, security, scalability, level of automation, supported operating systems, reliability, ease of migration and many more factors. You might want to work with two or more IaaS providers to spread risk, manage costs and optimise functionality based on the strengths of each provider.
The advantage of multicloud is that, because you’re not locked in to one vendor for all of your cloud services, you have the full control to build the cloud you need based on your priorities. It’s all about IT agility for better disaster recovery, faster service delivery and improved connectivity.
However, moving to a multicloud architecture has its drawbacks if you’re not careful. Even if you are ready to migrate services, the time it takes to provision connections to each cloud platform can make you feel like the cloud is the opposite of agile.
Colocation Is Ideal for Multicloud
The right IT environment can empower a multicloud strategy by giving you better choice over how you connect to the cloud. Colocation is that environment.
With colocation data centres that offer direct interconnections to multiple cloud service providers within the same facility, you gain the benefit of low latency connectivity. That translates to better service for your customers, even as you grow into new markets further away from your home region.
Additionally, with one physical connection in a colocation data centre, you can reach all your cloud providers through VLAN connections that are automatically provisioned at the time of the order. Not only does this save you time, but you don’t have the hassle of managing individual connections to all of your different cloud providers. It’s the simple solution for connecting to your cloud environments and gives the added benefits of security and high availability backed by SLAs.
If you really want to make the most of a best-of-breed strategy, carrier-neutral colocation data centres provide the added benefit of connectivity choice. With access to a wide range of internet service providers, you can pick the ISP that offers the best cost and quality of delivery for your cloud. That’s just another layer of optimisation to consider.
As IT becomes increasingly dispersed, remember that using a multicloud strategy doesn’t have to mean an overly complicated network solution. Work with your provider to figure out the best way forward for your business.
