The Multi-Cloud Future (2)— Why Exactly Should You Adopt Multi-Cloud?
While everyone agrees that multi-cloud is the future, the specific reasons differ from one enterprise to another. So what are they?
This is the second part of the “The Multi-Cloud Future” series. You can read the first part — The Multi-Cloud Future — Why Just “Cloud” and Not “Multi-Cloud” Will Impede Your Business Growth.
Trade and Economics have seen massive cycles of evolution over centuries and significantly more over the past half century. But what has that got to do with cloud or multi-cloud?
Cloud Computing is evolving much like the real world economics
The times and place where I grew up as a child, Protectionism was considered the true mark of economic growth. The general trend of the days were: Well, why would you need large multi-national companies to make measly things such as toothpastes? It was seen as a way to protect local businesses and rely on indigenous inventions for a localized growth.
While I moved into my teens, the world had already started moving from the old world of protectionism towards a liberalized economy. Economists viewed the easing or eradication of trade restrictions as steps to promote free trade, which in turn helped local businesses grow. The traditional concerns that rationalized protectionism seemed a moot point, as liberalization, as it turned out, only benefited local businesses.
Today, we live in a globalized economy. Integration among people, geographies, processes, companies, economies brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, investments and information has made globalization the norm of the day.
Cloud computing is all but a reflection of how businesses, trade and flow of information have been evolving in the real world. From the days of owning your own CapEx of data centers and operations, to moving to an OpEx model with cloud platforms, and now into cross-leveraging multiple cloud platforms to make the best of what the globalized economies have to offer, we’ve come as much of a full circle as we did in evolving from protectionism to globalization.
Keeping pace with the new needs of the expanding globalized economy
It’s an understatement to say that technology has played a major role in enriching the global economy today and would do so for the foreseeable decades. But technology is here to make businesses happen, for nations’ economics to grow, to help people feel connected, and secure. There are key factors that underpin the enablement and control of such levels of unprecedented growth. And much of those underpinnings also become reasons why multi-cloud becomes imperative to support our globalized economy.
Data Sovereignty
Data sovereignty is the idea that data is subject to the laws and governance structures within the nation where it is collected. There are many reasons — especially in Financial Services — where data needs to be stored at a particular geographic location where the company’s primary cloud provider may not necessarily have a data center. Similar to the Scenario 1 in the first part of this series, business expansions when governed by data sovereignty needs would adopt multi-cloud to de-risk their businesses and to stay compliant with local regulations.
Workload Placement
Our globalized economy also means being able to run a business in one hemisphere and be able to serve users across both hemispheres. Multi-cloud becomes another key necessity when you would have to place everyday transactional workloads that serve your users at closer proximity to where they live, so their latency is low and you get to provide an awesome experience to your customers.
Workload Portability
Businesses change constantly. There are innumerable reasons why your workloads running on one cloud today, may need to be moved as-is to an entirely different cloud tomorrow. It could be to save cost, simplify operations, unify scattered businesses functionalities, integrate your disparate data warehouses and so on. Seamless and low-risk mechanisms to port workloads from one cloud provider to another to address regulations, M&A or any other business concerns would be a strong reason to adopt a multi-cloud strategy.
Specialized Workloads
More often, CIOs run into a conundrum where a cloud provider they are not signed up with announces an exciting new technology that they would love to use. Having the flexibility to place workloads to leverage the unique strengths that each cloud provider can offer their business, is a key capability multi-cloud will provide. For instance — a line of business may be comprised of Web Apps on AWS, Data Analytics on Google Cloud and Active Directory on Azure.
Disaster Recovery Strategy
De-risk cloud vendor operational dependency by having a cross-cloud failover architecture for Disaster Recovery, possibly with role swap policies. You can make one cloud provider as the primary and another as DR, such that in the event of any catastrophic failure — albeit temporary or short lived — you can ensure seamless business continuity by failing over to the DR cloud. This can ensure stringent RPO, RTO compliance — which is typically a key mandate in financial services.
Partnerships, JV, M&A
Unify operations of workloads when enterprises committed to one or more cloud platforms, acquire or merge with enterprises committed to a different cloud platform. Similar to the two scenarios we discussed in the first part of this series, business growth often characterized by mergers, acquisitions and join-ventures would necessitate having an enterprise strategy of being able to work with data and workloads spread across multiple cloud platforms.
Vendor Lock-in
Over and above everything we discussed, enterprise never want to get locked into one vendor. Much like the difference between protectionism and globalization —keeping your enterprise architecture open enough to integrate and work with multiple cloud platforms to serve your global customer base becomes a key factor to ensure the longevity and stability of your future business expansions. Additionally, in the current age of cross-geography business expansions, accelerated digital transformations and M&As, locking into one cloud vendor would pose significant regulatory and scalability risks to enterprises.
Business conflicts of interest
This reason is best described by what Protocol reported here. Here’s a quick snippet.
Target was once all-in on Amazon, hiring it to run its entire ecommerce operation in 2001. Then Amazon bought Whole Foods, putting it in direct competition with Target’s grocery business. That conflict pushed Target off the leading cloud infrastructure player for good.
As you would read reported in that Protocol article, Target has now taken to a multi-cloud approach coming off AWS entirely and expanding over Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
In this part of the series, we discussed some of the specific reasons why enterprises take up the multi-cloud journey. Multi-cloud is a unique journey wherein beyond just making technology choices, it becomes a new paradigm of thinking the future of your business.
In the next post of this series, we’ll discuss how to “Think Multi-cloud” and some of the business and architecture considerations of a multi-cloud world.
