Over the last decade, the cost of maintaining data centers has risen dramatically and has impacted the costs of operations for business organizations. Businesses are leveraging a multi-cloud approach to achieve digital transformation and stay competitive. A recent article by Forbes reports that over 90% of organizations already have a multi-cloud strategy in place, and their data is distributed and accessed across multiple cloud service providers.

A multi-cloud environment enables business organizations to select the cloud services that best suit their workloads. Organizations are increasingly turning to multi-cloud models to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions to get an edge over the competition. By adopting a multi-cloud strategy, businesses can choose between different services, which helps mitigate risk and access the right solutions. Given this scenario, the adoption rate of multi-cloud solutions will continue to rise in the coming years.

What is a Multi-cloud Strategy?

A multi-cloud combines two or more public, private, and/or edge clouds used to access applications and services. Businesses that leverage multiple cloud services for digital transformation have an advantage over competitors that rely on one or two cloud service providers. Business units within an organization have different IT needs – for example, Data Scientists may prefer to use the Google cloud because of its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. In contrast, AWS offers a more mature and diverse set of cloud infrastructure services to deploy complex applications on the public cloud.

Organizations have understood the need for a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to streamline their IT operations while maintaining standard practices across their business units. Today, many businesses want to prioritize and adopt a multi-cloud strategy for their organizations in 2022. However, they do not have the right resources to execute a seamless multi-cloud strategy.

Common Challenges with a Multi-Cloud Approach:

• Security – Working and managing applications on a single cloud platform is relatively easy. Running applications become complex when deployed on multiple clouds, leaving them vulnerable. There is a need to have a comprehensive multi-cloud approach that balances workloads on virtual servers, helping security teams to discover threats instantly.

• Cloud Integration – Multi-cloud integrations need an exchange of resources from different cloud providers; else, there is a risk of data silos in the multi-cloud environment. Traditional data integration technology is complex and time-consuming, and organizations should adopt a robust data integration solution that works well with all cloud providers.

• Overhead Cost – There can be an additional cost when transferring data from one cloud service to another. Such transfers can be expensive because moving data out of one cloud and into another from different service providers is higher than the cost of transferring data within a cloud from the same service provider. Each cloud service provider charges differently for their service, so it is crucial to understand the pricing structure to keep a check on the cost.

• Certified Professionals – Many organizations have a shortage of cloud professionals who understand multiple cloud platforms. Businesses generally find it challenging to have an in-house team capable of implementing and running operations on multiple cloud platforms. Multi-cloud professionals must possess working knowledge of networking construction in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc., and proficiency in understanding use cases in a multi-cloud architecture.

The following diagram outlines the top three challenges that organizations face in a multi-cloud environment:

Advantages of a Multi-Cloud Strategy:

The right multi-cloud management approach can help businesses save money, increase agility and improve the performance of their enterprise applications. However, the success of a multi-cloud strategy depends on its implementation, the integrated visibility of all the cloud systems and real-time performance updates of deployed apps. The following are some of the main benefits of adopting a multi-cloud strategy:

• Vendor Lock-In – Vendor lock-in is a situation where a customer using a cloud service cannot easily migrate to another cloud service provider. With multiple cloud partners, businesses can reduce their dependency on a single cloud platform, reducing the risk of Vendor Lock-in.

• 100% Uptime – Businesses are relying on a single cloud provider will have less control over the servers. However, using multiple cloud providers can give the business the advantage of having a backup server helping them mitigate any IT disaster risks.

• Cloud Agility – With a multi-cloud strategy, data can reside closer to the place of need. This reduces latency and downtime and increases agility in data replication, disaster recovery, and performance optimization.

• Better Customer Experience – Using multi-cloud platforms offers more flexibility by leveraging the best features of the service providers. This enables the development team to innovate and provide a seamless customer experience without compromising on the quality of your services.

Conclusion

With the right multi-cloud approach, businesses can reduce dependency on a single cloud provider, increase the application’s performance and reduce operational risks. However, managing multi-cloud infrastructure can be complex and overwhelming for the development, operations, and testing teams. Moreover, getting the right resource capable of implementing and managing a multi-cloud strategy is extremely important and challenging at the same time.

Consulting firms like Opteamix help businesses customize the appropriate cloud solution that helps achieve digital transformation goals. If your business faces any challenges in building, managing, and deploying apps in a multi-cloud environment, get in touch to speak with experts from our Cloud Center of Excellence. Our certified cloud experts can help you understand the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy, identify the best platforms for your use case, and drive the maximum return on your cloud investments.

Visit our Cloud Services page to learn how Opteamix can help you digitally transform your organization with the right cloud strategy based on your business needs.