Are you ready for a multicloud world?

Multicloud is the new reality

Is your company ready for the multicloud world?

Multicloud is the new reality and for many companies the use of multiple public clouds is inevitable. The initial cloud concept was to deploy workloads onto a single cloud platform in a data center. But, public and multicloud platforms are now attractive options because they provide enterprises with more choice, agility and flexibility.

Now, more and more businesses are transforming their IT landscape with multicloud using multiple cloud platforms such as: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure to increase scalability, reduce costs or become more agile in their application infrastructure. In fact, today, as many as 76% of cloud buyers use multiple cloud providers¹. A multicloud strategy provides more agility, flexibility and choice, but they can be complex and difficult to manage. Once the decision is made to adopt a multicloud strategy, enterprises are discovering that these environments come with their own set of challenges.

The complexity of managing workloads across multiple platforms is difficult at best. Security becomes more challenging as ever-growing cyber threats rise. Now, security teams must defend against new threats while managing services, processes and tools that may be different from one cloud provider to the next.

The complexity of managing workloads across multiple platforms is difficult.

The good news is that, although multicloud has its challenges, as I note in my blog entitled, ‘Can multicloud be simplified to the point where anything is possible?’, the complexities can be simplified with technology and business benefits that far outweigh the challenges and complexities.

The advantages of multicloud outweigh the complexities

Despite the complexities, multicloud infrastructures are a smart investment with advantages that far outweigh the challenges:  

1. Avoid vendor lock-in. A multicloud strategy can prevent vendor lock-in allowing your business to be in control. This flexibility allows CIOs the ability to select the right tool for the right job, a mechanism to leverage technology innovation from different providers. Technology and cloud are changing so rapidly, and they’re changing a lot. Companies that are less ‘locked down’ have flexibility and agility to grow with new cloud technologies.
   
   
2. Managed cloud services provider expertise. Companies that engage a managed cloud service provider can increase productivity and enhance functionality provided to clients without hiring additional staff or spending time managing the cloud environment. Managed service provider experts do the heavy lifting in managing, securing and ensuring the environment operates at optimal performance.
   
   
3. Flexibility and scalability. Businesses grow. Demands change. Technology innovations rapidly occur. Multicloud solutions scale along with your business. By engaging more than one cloud-hosting company, enterprises can match needs to the solutions that fit the best and alter them to fit business and technology requirements.
   
   
4. Predictable costs. Improve the predictability of your consumption-based public cloud costs.
   
   
5. Drives innovation. Drive innovation with automated, simplified multicloud management processes that ensure efficient orchestration of data across multiple cloud platforms.  

Choosing the right strategic partner is key to preparing for multicloud

Many organizations are taking a multicloud approach to decrease exposure to vendor lock-in when designing an architecture, utilizing a mixture of on-premises, private virtualization, and more than one public cloud provider (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, and others) depending on application and data requirements. Once your organization has chosen a multicloud strategy, how will it be monitored, managed and maintained? How will you secure your network and application architecture? How will you protect data and maintain regulatory compliance? Has IT embraced DevOps to support multicloud architectures?

A proven way to make the deployment, operation and management of a multicloud strategy successful and to ensuring your business is ready for multicloud, is choosing the right strategic partner — one who can guide your organization through the ever-changing landscape and provide management, security, compliance and governance and observability across a variety of public and private cloud environments. The provider must be able to provide everything from application modernization, management, observability, patching, disaster recovery, backup, security, audit support and governance.

Next stop: multicloud success

Multicloud is here to stay. Adopting a multicloud approach is a huge benefit for organizations that rely on cloud for their mission-critical IT infrastructure. With the right multicloud as a service provider, anything is possible.

Is your organization ready for the multicloud world? Contact our experts to help you get started on your multicloud transformation journey.

Read more about our Multicloud as a Service solutions. 

¹ Forecast Analysis: Cloud Consulting and Implementation Services, Worldwide, July 21