Businesses today are constantly looking for new strategies to streamline their operations, increase scalability, and boost overall effectiveness. And the adoption of multi-cloud is one such strategy that has gained significant momentum. The future is undoubtedly in harnessing the power of a multi-cloud as technology develops and business needs become more complex. In this blog, we'll look at why the future is multi-cloud and learn how businesses can benefit from it.
Multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud?
Making the right choice
Before we deep dive into the topic lets first understand the difference between multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud. This differentiation is important because based on the business, the requirement will vary and hence the type of cloud system deployed. A hybrid cloud combines two or more cloud architectures that are not identical, in contrast to the multi-cloud infrastructure that typically integrates clouds of the same general category.
A Netflix story
Now, let’s start with a short story. Back in 2011, Netflix experienced a major outage due to an issue with their primary cloud provider. To prevent similar disruptions in the future, they decided to implement a multi-cloud strategy in response. Netflix improved resilience by spreading out their workload across several cloud platforms. Thereby discovering the value of diversifying their infrastructure, which would enable them to easily switch between various cloud providers and reduce the risk of service interruptions.
Implementing multi-cloud
The benefits
We saw how Netflix benefited from a multi-cloud approach, lets now focus on how your business can benefit from the same.
Benefit 1: Options to choose from
In contrast to conventional cloud models, a multi-cloud approach allows you to choose from a variety of cloud suppliers on the market. Additionally, it gives you the freedom to mix and match certain features and capabilities offered by the provider to optimize your workload in light of variables like speed, performance, dependability, location, security, and compliance.
Benefit 2: Cloud innovation
Like any other service, cloud providers constantly innovate and experiment. They invest heavily on developing new products and services. Multi-cloud enables you to leverage emerging technologies without having to rely on a services provided by a single vendor.
Benefit 3: Increased reliability
Multi-cloud strategy helps to decrease unplanned downtime or outages, reducing the risk of a single point of failure. If one cloud experiences an outage, it won't necessarily affect services in other clouds. Additionally, if your cloud goes down, your computing needs can be redirected to another cloud that is prepared to handle them.
Benefit 4: Meeting compliance needs
The increasing stringent data privacy and governance regulations such as the CCPA and the GDPR require that the customer data be stored in specific locations only. Employing multi-cloud enables you to deliver this specific requirement without having to build and manage your own on-premises data centers or data lakes.
Benefit 5: Increase in performance
You can build a faster infrastructure that maximizes application performance and lowers the cost of integrating cloud solutions with your IT system with the help of a multi-cloud strategy. You can establish connections that enhance user experience and response time. With multi-cloud, you can also pick and choose providers based on their geographic reach and their capacity to meet your needs in terms of performance and cost.
Benefit 6: Enhanced resilience
Businesses can improve their security, failover options, and disaster recovery with a multi-cloud strategy. It makes sure that data storage resources are always accessible, strengthening the organization's cloud deployment over time. Additionally, it helps in reducing performance-harming elements like jitter, packet loss, and latency, which are typically brought on by switching between networks and servers.
Is multi-cloud the right choice for you?
A quick insight
We saw some of the key benefits of deploying a multi-cloud strategy in your organization. But have to thought to stop and ask if your business is ready for a multi-cloud implementation? Or what type of businesses benefit the most from multi-cloud?
The answer depends on several critical business factors. It would interest you to know that SaaS providers can easily adopt multi-cloud while large enterprises find it difficult to successfully manage them. This is because of the complexity that comes with the increase is business size. If your business has a specific requirement such as integrating with Internet of Things (IoT) devices or certain third-party solutions, implementing a multi-cloud strategy will provide the most benefits.
Multi-cloud enables a lot of freedom in resource management. Keep in mind that adding more integrations dramatically increases the complexity of the system. You need to train your employees to efficiently manage multi-cloud since there are no tools available for this purpose.
The conclusion
There is no doubt businesses can benefit from multi-cloud but assessing your environment thoroughly before implementing would be the right choice. Multi-cloud could not be a one size fits all approach and you will need to make modifications in your current infrastructure to help you get the maximum benefit out of its usage. So, think wisely before taking your chance with multi-cloud.
