Managing a multi-cloud environment: Strategies for success
Do you work in a company that has their own website or any software application that is open to people? Where do you think that application is running?
Most modern-day companies have a website that needs to run constantly without infrastructural flaws. Before the 21st century, organisations would purchase expensive physical servers and deploy the application on it. That is until the first cloud service ‘AWS’ emerged in 2002, shortly followed by Google in 2008.
This new development allowed organisations to run applications on the cloud providers’ servers, which gave rise to new terminology in the tech industry such as private cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid multi-cloud solutions.
In this blog, we will look into what multi-cloud is, its benefits, and how to manage a multi-cloud environment.
What is multi-cloud?
Cloud services have been used for more than a decade now and it has significantly reduced the cost of running an application. This is where an organisation relies on a single cloud provider.
“In the enterprise, multi-cloud typically refers to running enterprise applications on platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) from multiple cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.” [1] This approach allows the organisation to adopt niche strategies and services from a range of providers.
The finance sector is the top user of multi-cloud strategies, where 60% of financial companies are involved with cloud providers. This strategy helps the industry to serve its plethora of technical requirements such as vendor diversification, giving companies the option of having critical systems on-premise while the rest can be running in different clouds. A robust multi-cloud strategy can provide organisations with data residency, low latency due to their transactional nature, and interdependency with other applications or users.
What is the difference between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud?
We know that multi-cloud brings together the best parts of two or more cloud providers, but doesn’t that make it a hybrid cloud architecture?
There is often confusion surrounding these two terminologies. A multi-cloud is technically a hybrid cloud, but the difference is that hybrid architecture must always include a private cloud that acts as a separate entity.
Benefits of multi-cloud
The above approach helps an enterprise tackle key obstacles such as ‘vendor lock-in’ — this is when an enterprise is stuck with one cloud provider who they have previously hosted all of their applications with. Avoiding this helps in increased flexibility and scalability, reliability and resilience, and better risk management, as well as driving innovation.
Increased flexibility and scalability
This architecture helps the enterprise to scale up and down more efficiently and in a cost-effective manner. Different resources in different cloud providers can be assigned roles such as analytics, messaging queues, and more. All this workload can be managed independently by using the multi-cloud architecture.
Reliability and resilience
In the end, a cloud service is a physical server running in a data centre. There may be cases where a certain resource is facing downtime due to power outages or latency issues.
Having a multi-cloud architecture allows us to conveniently switch to the other cloud provider if we are facing issues. It keeps the system running, irrespective of the obstacles from the vendor side. This also adds an extra layer of protection from threats that might bring the system down.
Whilst it can be seen that multi-cloud strategies are making a positive change performance-wise, it does come with the added cost of complicated cloud architecture, as each cloud and their resources should be orchestrated to perfection. Moreover, using IaC for deploying this strategy can become overwhelming when we are dealing with different providers. This strategy also heightens the chances of cyberattacks, and extensive care is needed while making the security polices to preserve the integrity of our systems.
This architecture ensures that the enterprise has a reliable and resilient system, where all resources and data are readily available under any circumstance.
Drives innovation
Implementing a cloud architecture with multiple cloud providers means that employees will be exposed to a plethora of services. The enterprise will have employees well trained in multiple cloud services; this comes in handy when the enterprise’s business model is based on ‘technology consulting’.
For example, Credera will benefit if their engineers/architects are proficient in AWS and GCP as this will help our internal Resourcing team to easily assign engineers/architects to clients.
Cost management
Here are some stats provided by VMware’s Cloud Economics assessment practice:
- “Moving to a consistent multi-cloud environment is, on average, 33.6% less expensive than a move that will lock you into the platforms of the major cloud providers.” [2]
- “Moving to a consistent multi-cloud environment is 25.8% less expensive than updating your data centre with the latest technology.” [2]
- “In roughly 85% of cases, a consistent multi-cloud environment will be less expensive than the other public cloud options.” [2]
Multi-cloud management
We have looked at what multi-cloud is and why is it beneficial. Now, let’s look at steps and measures that need to be followed to set this architecture up. The key to implementing it successfully is to ensure that all of the resources from multiple clouds are on one single entity.
Research vendors and backup failovers
It is essential to do a thorough check on what a particular cloud vendor provides, and the enterprise should make sure it aligns with their own specific needs. The cloud strategy should remain front of mind whilst selecting the vendors, as well as the financial costs involved, the training required for employees, etc.
It is also important to investigate the disaster management plan for the cloud provider. How often do they back up the data? How long is the data retained for? Are all of the resources backed up? What do their business contingency plans consist of?
The enterprise should carry out thorough research into the vendor and become familiar with its methods. Organisations may also benefit from preparing an additional back up strategy, also known as ‘dual back up strategy’, as it will help to consolidate an organisation’s back up data.
Preventing potential lock-ins
When dealing with cloud providers, ensure that the enterprise is not getting locked into a specific provider - i.e. the majority of the system runs under a specific cloud provider. If this is the case, organisations will not benefit from the true potential of the multi-cloud architecture.
Another step to consider is planning out the entry and exit strategies into the cloud. This should be discussed before signing the contract, as migrating systems in or out of a cloud can be expensive if proper plans have not been laid out.
Research about management tools
As multi-cloud architecture is a very complex structure, any systems running in it will be difficult to monitor. It is worth looking into multi-cloud management platforms, as it helps to orchestrate complex structures under one environment, as well as providing visibility and control over any cloud resources existing in the multi-cloud environment (including PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS).
This will also help in analysing and monitoring logs to get a better understanding of the whole system under one single platform. Examples of such platforms include Scalr, Embotics vCommander, and IBM Multicloud Manager.
Closing words
So what is the difference between a hybrid and multi-cloud architecture, which sector benefits most from it, and why ?
A multi-cloud strategy helps an organisation build a reliable and resilient system, drive innovation, and manage costs. The most important thing to keep in mind whilst managing a multi-cloud environment is to do the research upfront around potential vendors, lock-ins, and management tools.
Got a question?
Please get in touch to speak to a member of our team at Credera.
