Building a Successful, Multi-Cloud Strategy
Multi-cloud is an approach where an organisation leverages two or more cloud computing platforms to perform various tasks to access the cloud services that are the best fit.
It’s NOT a hybrid cloud, which is typically a paired private and public cloud. Multi-cloud concurrently uses separate cloud providers for infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS) and software (SaaS) services.
Factors leading to Multi-cloud adoption
- Businesses are adopting the multi-cloud strategy to maximise availability. Very high availability is a key for mission-critical applications, which allows workloads to run in edges. Anthos from Google Cloud is one such service which allows Kubernetes cluster to run across cloud and on-premise environments!
- An individual cloud platform may not be able to provide an organisation with all of the computing services it requires. Specific services offered by each platform differ in feature and functionality. This can be a reason where an organisation can choose more than one cloud to address different business needs.
- For example, GCP — BigQuery is a serverless data-warehouse with multi-cloud support and helps in analysing data across clouds. Similarly, AWS MSK or AWS Kinesis makes it easier to ingest data at scale. Azure Databricks brings Spark on Databricks into Azure with ease.
- Specific cloud vendor affinity and readiness towards the industry is another driving factor for enterprises to choose one or more cloud providers. A particular public cloud could be associated and be more popular with one sector, thus satisfying compliance and regulation requirements or adoption by that industry.
- Few other factors include the compute capacities (VMs) going down to the cost of running raw workloads suitable for data science or research and storage. Few examples are A100 GPU from Google or P3 from AWS or N-Series from Azure.
Key challenges
- Reliable data transfer across multiple clouds while keeping data secure and costs low
- Inconsistent specific cloud service benefits across different cloud vendors
- Managing multi-cloud disparate environments through a single glass of pane
- Governing security across multi-cloud complex n-Tier application architecture
- The pressure of keeping on top of all the new features and functionality constantly pushed by Cloud vendors
- Increased business procurement cost and the complexity of working with multiple Cloud suppliers
- Increased cost to hire, train and retain people with multi-cloud skills
- Lack of centralised management and monitoring of infrastructures
- Migrating workloads across different clouds without business disruptions
HorizonX Multi-Cloud Principles
With our various deployment of Multi-cloud solutions, we have learnt that Multi-cloud strategy must not focus on individual cloud platforms but the encompassing technologies.
The fundamental policy is to achieve — Managing multi-cloud disparate environments through a single pane of glass. The technology fulfilling multi-cloud should be segregated from the cloud-native resources that it is managing and leverages technologies that traverse the ecosystem and is not limited to a platform.
How can HorizonX help?
Our rich cloud engineering experience and technology-agnostic approach will enable you to devise the optimal multi-cloud solution for your business. Contact us for a consultation with our Chief Technology Office. To assess your current multi-cloud strategy and see if the business goals are achieved, or if you need a multi-cloud strategy to align with the business goals.
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