The Multi-Cloud Future (3) — To Do Multi-cloud, You Should First ‘Think Multi-cloud’
Having multiple clouds is not the same as having a multi-cloud strategy. We introduce you to the “Four Pillars of Multi-cloud thinking”.
This is the third part of the “The Multi-Cloud Future” series. You can read the first part — Why Just “Cloud” and Not “Multi-Cloud” Will Impede Your Business Growth. And the second part — Why Exactly Should You Adopt Multi-Cloud?. Now read on…
Multi-cloud is a paradigm shift in how computing has evolved over generations. As we discussed in the previous edition of this series, cloud computing has evolved much like the real world economics. Much like succeeding in a globalized economy needs a transformed thought process that breaks the boundaries of protectionism and liberalization, multi-cloud requires a transformed thought process to succeed.
Why is multi-cloud a new thought process and not just another technology?
I’ve heard some CIOs remark that they do multi-cloud because they have invested in all three major cloud platforms — many of their applications run on AWS, many other applications and data warehouses reside on Google Cloud and they use Office 365. While it’s true that such organizations do operate their business across multiple clouds, it is far from being called a true multi-cloud environment.
Having multiple clouds is not the same as having or leveraging a multi-cloud strategy. On the contrary, a multi-cloud strategy is a holistic global strategy that takes into account,
- Tactical and Strategic business goals
- Regulatory requirements for every geography your enterprise operates in (more critical for Financial Services)
- Maturity and life-cycle of your existing technology stack and its efficacy in meeting your business goals
- Your DevSecOps processes and how fast and seamless are your release cycles
- Operational efficiency and cost of managing cloud and on-premise infrastructure in correlation to your top-line
- Maturity of your security controls to scale together with your business growth
In the light of these business considerations, it’s important for CIOs and CTOs to drive an organization-wide global strategy that drives the four key pillars of multi-cloud thinking.
Managing your enterprise data across multiple cloud platforms
Your company’s most important asset is your data. It’s quite an oxymoron that the biggest challenges facing most large organizations is the challenge of managing data — well, their most important asset. Multi-cloud has opened hitherto unlikely possibilities of giving a unified single pane of glass view to your data — irrespective of where it was, such that you are now able to understand and put your data to use far better than in the past.
One unified way of deploying and governing multiple clouds
Adopting a multi-cloud strategy is often fraught with the challenge of scaling your operations and support teams to be able to learn the skills, tools and allocating resource bandwidth to manage all your cloud investments (and not to forget your on-premise investments). Google Cloud has been built from the ground-up with a multi-cloud philosophy. In the subsequent posts in this series, we’ll discuss technologies and tools provided by Google that can empower your operations teams to create simple yet scalable environments with a single unified way of managing all your clouds.
Modernized API-driven GitOps enabled portable workloads
While you are having your data sorted out and keeping your operations teams happy, you also need to ensure your software delivery cycles get quicker, more secure and that you are able to utilize your GitOps pipelines to deploy and manage your releases across all your clouds. All the while, making sure your workloads remains portable (read the section “Workload Portability” in the previous edition of this series Why Exactly Should You Adopt Multi-Cloud?).
Unified security across on-premise and all clouds
Every cloud out there is built with security as a foremost necessity and have several compliance certifications to back them. While the configuration of security controls, setup and management may differ from one cloud to another, it’s important that organizations are able to apply a single unified security policy across all of their cloud platforms.
In this post, we discussed why adopting multi-cloud requires adopting a different way of thinking and we introduced the four pillars of multi-cloud thinking. In the future posts of this series, we will delve deep into each of the four pillars and into the technologies and architecture patterns of implementing them using Google Cloud.
But before going deeper into the pillars, the next post will cover 5 key patterns of multi-cloud that are usually prevalent across organizations that have adopted multi-cloud.
