While multi cloud is inevitable, it is necessary to drive the adoption of multiple providers, which is not happening in enterprises.
We have reiterated in our articles that the pandemic, from a technological perspective, has created several urgencies for organizations. One of them concerns the migration to the cloud.
Why Take A Multi-Cloud Approach
Don’t Stick To A Provider
Suppose before; the options were either building a data center or allocating resources to providers; today, with so many possibilities to choose from. In that case, companies want to ensure the flexibility to respond to changes in the cloud market by changing or adding providers.
Better Price
With the ability to leverage other clouds, organizations are guaranteed more pricing options and discounts on services that will meet their needs.
Performance
Each provider has its specialties and offerings in cloud security, compliance, etc., which will also meet the needs of organizations in different ways.
Operation Needs
Organizations may require the cloud to permeate regions in which they operate and allow expansion to new areas of the planet.
Architectural Resilience
Another reason is ensuring that applications stay up and running in any possible data center or cloud provider accident scenarios.
Compliance And Security
By the way, highly regulated sectors such as finance have an express obligation to avoid dependence on a single provider, for example, having at least a second for this purpose.
Challenges Of A Multi-Cloud Strategy
Despite the myriad reasons to adopt a multi-cloud approach, there are challenges. Let’s see the main ones:
Disorganized Adherence
As we have seen, although they are adopting multi-cloud approaches in combinations of multiple public and private clouds, this seems to be more of an inevitable outcome than an intentional strategy.
Complexity
In the case of vast provider possibilities, it is not uncommon for applications to have a more bloated infrastructure – since each choice entails different capabilities and tools –which will automatically require more work from the IT team and DevOps.
Higher Management Costs
As well as complexity, it will be more laborious to calculate and estimate costs. Without this predictability, the prices of managing a multi-cloud approach can be prohibitive.
A migration Framework For Multi-Cloud
This multicolored certainty makes sticking to a single vendor impractical in the long term to avoid all of the above challenges. However, it points to organizations’ need for greater clarity on how to prepare for and manage a multi-cloud strategy.
Let’s look at a basic framework:
Identify The Motivations For Cloud Adoption
Making a careful consideration of both current and new applications, in a very objective way, to identify their motivations is the starting point.
For example, you will need fast access to computing resources to speed up application delivery. The provider’s scale can decrease the price if your goal is to increase operational efficiency. To meet seasonal peaks, on-demand flexibility and elasticity may also imply savings. Adopting a geographically close cloud server will be a better decision for lower latency. And so it goes.
Create A Cloud Portfolio
How many clouds and which ones will you need according to your goals? According to the Flex era 2020 Estate of the Cloud Report, the number of clouds used on average by companies is:
- Public
- Using: 2.2
- Experiencing: 1.2
- Private
- Using: 2.2
- Experiencing: 1.7
Here, consideration should encompass the strengths and weaknesses of each possible provider, the needs of the applications to be migrated, concerns about maintaining a link with only one provider as an impact on future changes and regulations, etc.
It is unnecessary to guarantee portability among all providers or maintain a minimum common denominator.
Manage Challenges
We talked about the main challenges of a multi-cloud approach above. To solve them, it will be necessary, in terms of governance:
- give visibility to provisioned resources, structure cloud accounts, standardize access, and ensure monitoring and audits to reduce risks and ensure compliance through automatic controls
- monitor, predict and provide cost efficiencies so they don’t get out of control
- understand how to architect for cloud scalability, reliability, and performance.
Multi Cloud: Not By Chance, By Choice Of The Organization
To properly enable all points of your multi-cloud strategy, have the support of the leaders of the various stakeholders, such as operations, development, security, finance, and compliance.
Also, consider having a team of cloud experts with architects and DevOps engineers and a cloud VP to drive multi-cloud initiatives closely.
Also Read: Three Industry Challenges In Migrating To The Cloud