Cloud computing usage has increased considerably over the last few years and it has become an integral part of many businesses. However, similar to on-site hosting, cloud services are also prone to failures. We even witnessed several large-scale incidents of such cloud failures. Last year Google cloud services and websites were down for around 1 hour after being hit by an outage.
Nowadays, with the entire business operations completely dependent on the cloud, even a brief period of a cloud outage can bring great loss to your organization. The immediate impact of an outage can be reduced productivity and revenue for your organization. So, how can organizations keep their business protected during such outages?
By leveraging a multi-cloud environment, organizations can distribute their workload across multiple cloud environments. With that, if any one of the environments goes down, businesses can still access mission-critical systems and data.
Why Organizations Should Adopt Multi-Cloud Strategy?
Depending on just one cloud platform for all your business needs can be difficult at some point. Multi-cloud solution is the next big thing that lets companies to bring many technologies together in one single system.
Following are some of the benefits of adopting multi-cloud strategy,
- Find best-in-class services
With multi-cloud you can choose a wide range of services from a combination of platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, VMware, etc. thereby allowing organizations to create a customized solution that best fits the needs and requirements. AWS is known for its cost-effectiveness while Azure offers a robust enterprise presence. On the other hand, Google Cloud Platform is the best when it comes to analytics. Having a multi-cloud strategy in place, lets your organization select the best services that suits your business needs. - Improved agility
There are still lots of businesses struggling with legacy IT systems and on-premise structures. By adopting multi-cloud strategies such businesses can effectively manage their operations and workload, thereby improving agility. - Vendor lock-in situations
Vendor lock-in in cloud computing means the inability of businesses to switch to another cloud service provider for better features and benefits. Adopting a cloud-computing strategy helps businesses to avoid vendor lock-in situations and make the most of multiple cloud platforms at once. - Cost-effectiveness
One of the main benefits of multi-cloud adoption is reduced operational and capital expenditure. Multi-cloud architecture helps organization to compare the prices of each service providers, thereby allowing them to choose the best option available. - Data Security
Data security is one important aspect most organization look upon, when selecting a service provider. As the amount of digital data is increasing each day, it is important to ensure the safety of it. With multi-cloud strategy businesses can select cloud platforms that offers the best data security to them and comply with the all the security regulations. - Business continuity during outages
Businesses can also use one environment for storing data, while another one for storing other workloads. Hence, by storing data in more than one cloud, you can be rest assured that your data will remain available even if any one of the environments goes down. Superior security, low latency, cost-effectiveness and the capability to transfer data across multiple platforms quickly are some of the other benefits of adopting multi-cloud. - Flexibility and scalability
Amount of data that is being created is increasing each day. Multi-cloud offers the right place to process and store all that information with real time syncs. Not only does it let you store data, you can even scale your storage up or down based on the demand.
Plan for Multi-Cloud Adoption
Initially businesses focused on leveraging the benefits of one single cloud platform. As a result, it was much easier for organizations to build their operational capabilities with a cloud center model. To leverage additional benefits organizations are now planning to expand to other cloud platforms as well. However, it is not as simple as it seems. As organizations move from one platform to multiple ones, there are several factors that needs to be considered.
The first step in planning for a multi-cloud strategy is to identify your business priorities. If your organization is looking for ways to optimize cost, then you might need to go ahead with cloud providers who offer cheap storage services for storing your business data. If you want to ensure business continuity in case of any outages, it would be nice to distribute your data over multiple cloud environments.
Another main challenge is to train your employees. Staffs of your organization might require additional training to effectively manage multiple cloud platforms beyond a single environment. Your organization might need to figure out ways for achieving it.
Read, How to Plan for Multicloud Architecture to know more.
Conclusion
Cloud computing has brought in flexibility, accessibility and resilience for business units and IT professionals. Currently, most organizations are adopting multi-cloud strategies, so as to make the most use of cloud and to modernize their IT infrastructure. Many technology leaders such as Google believes that the future is all about multi-cloud technologies. Hence, it is important for organizations to prepare accordingly for a multi-cloud world.
Reduced operational and capital expenditure, improved data security and availability are some of the benefits that multi-cloud brings into an organization. However, the task of adopting multi-cloud isn't as easy as it looks. Even though you may face some hiccups along the way, with a right cloud migration plan, you will be able to achieve success.
Get in touch with us if you need any assistance on cloud services.