Although many companies say their data is in the cloud, more often than not that means a patchwork of digital infrastructure combining multiple public clouds. In fact, 84% of enterprises are utilizing a multi-cloud strategy.
Why work with multiple cloud service providers? Far-reaching global companies need more than just one cloud’s capabilities. They need an ecosystem of clouds to serve a range of purposes, optimising for cost, capabilities, and benefits. When it comes down to it, companies need a multicloud strategy to capitalise on cloud migration, to ensure their mission-critical applications run without fail, and to avoid complete reliance on one IaaS provider.
How do you choose?
In today’s digital world, companies need to run workloads in environments that make the most sense for the job, whether they’re focused on cost or performance. Each cloud provider is traditionally known by its customers for having a certain area of expertise. For example, Microsoft Azure is the dominant home of the enterprise, Google is known for its analytics platform, while most developers prefer building on Amazon Web Services. When strategising where to place workloads, IT teams typically lean on these reputations because it provides them with peace of mind and the credentials to justify the decision to the wider organisation.
On the flip side, many cloud providers are challenging these reputations with evolving capabilities. For example, Google has been making a bid to capture more of Microsoft’s share of the enterprise, and beyond the developer community, AWS is known for its attractive price points and scale. Also, providers are constantly shifting their offerings, potentially dropping capabilities essential to your operation. If you were to commit to just one cloud, you could face immense trade-offs. It makes sense to scrutinise your cloud environment often, reassessing which cloud can best support various areas of your infrastructure.
Achieve resilience
Beyond picking the best cloud for individual workloads, companies need to design an ecosystem that runs smoothly and with high uptime. Even providers with excellent reputations can suffer outages, slow-downs, or security breaches.
The digital economy moves so quickly that even seemingly small delays between transactions could impact customer loyalty. A multicloud approach delivers data redundancy to ensure mission-critical applications and data are accessible and functioning despite hiccups or unforeseen digital disasters. At the same time, multicloud strategy places IT resources closest to the customer for better latency and fewer dropouts.
Dodge vendor lock-in
From a commercial standpoint, multicloud strategy provides businesses with valuable negotiating power. With a bevy of possibilities at their fingertips, companies can demand their existing cloud provider add new resources or make a case for competitive pricing.
From an IT development standpoint, if a company links all of their data and applications to one cloud’s infrastructure, it could later be challenging to innovate and expand by leveraging another cloud’s unique value – for example, Alibaba’s fast-track into APAC markets. If they plan to leverage multiple clouds from the start, companies are better suited to bring on new platforms to make the most of their offerings.
Multicloud strategy allows companies to take advantage of cloud migration’s core value: the flexibility to scale, quickly capitalise on evolving digital innovation, and save infrastructure costs and hassle. But as the number of cloud providers rises, the more complex your IT environment becomes. Many teams lack the skillset to manage their numerous clouds and an increasingly complicated network, as well as the bandwidth and expertise to stay on the pulse of the latest updates that could inform a redesign of their initial layout. As a result data centres and networks providers have been stepping up to handle cloud management, allowing to focus your precious internal resources on primary business goals. Which is what cloud technology set out to do in the first place.
Having a partner to guide your multicloud strategy is crucial to digital success. Learn more about CloudConnect here.