The road to multi cloud infrastructure for enterprises
Remember the days when a company’s workloads were married to one cloud service? When you could reap the advantages of the said service; while living with areas where it was lacking? Well, those days are behind us. According to a research conducted by Flexera in 2019, 84% of the global enterprises are already using multi cloud strategy.
Hybrid cloud architecture
Today, a multi cloud or hybrid cloud architecture brings in a lot of benefits and is quickly becoming a promising strategy for companies. Multi cloud uses a private/public cloud service or a combination of both from different cloud vendors. Whereas, hybrid-cloud deployment is the combination of private, public clouds and traditional data centers i.e., on-premises that work together effectively even if they have a different infrastructure, work under a single heterogeneous environment.
Hence, being on multiple clouds gives enterprises the flexibility to find the best cloud solutions that fit their budget, without the risk of depending on one vendor.
The need for an multi cloud ecosystem
As companies struggle to navigate these tough times, cost control and business continuity are their top priorities to stay afloat. It forces companies to work with the best efficiencies, optimize resource utilization and gain cost advantages wherever possible. Under the circumstances, it makes sense to leverage the agility, flexibility and unique advantages that multiple providers offer. Why settle for one?
While the wave suggests that companies that do not get on the multi cloud bandwagon may be left behind, there is an appreciable amount of skepticism that makes enterprises hesitant to adopt a multi cloud strategy. Also, if you look into the hybrid-cloud architecture, which is typically Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform, global leading companies already adopted them and some main IaaS platforms are AWS from Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud platform.
Multi Cloud : Complexities & Challenges
There are certain concerns for adopting a multi cloud setup like securing the infrastructures when managing across private and public clouds, a solid in-house team to tackle the migration challenges etc, which holds them back to take that big step. Let us briefly look into some major complexities while setting-up a multi cloud environment. Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform, global leading companies already adopted them and some main IaaS platforms are AWS from Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud platform.
1) Security
Security continues to be the topmost concern for any enterprise while contemplating a multi cloud hybrid infrastructure. Some basic checklists especially which wants to adapt the hybrid cloud deployment solutions on multi-tenant environments are,
- Maintaining the sanctity of data
- Creating impenetrable security walls,
- Implementing airtight migration of applications
- Meeting various compliance standards like HIPAA, PCI, DSS, etc, and,
- Adhering to industry best DevSecOps practices
While the cloud vendors address these concerns, it requires end users to do their bit—like performing regular audits, maintaining logs, backups and history, collaborating with the vendors periodically in understanding and following best practices.
2) Compliance and data management
Using multiple cloud vendors and data centers can sometimes mean the data sits in distinct parts of the world, which requires understanding and adhering to compliance formats and requirements of all the countries. Even if an enterprise has SMEs to handle this, it might get difficult to keep up with this changing landscape. There are certain guidelines to be followed diligently;
- Some of these guidelines, when breached, can cause hefty fines and blacklisting of the company.
- GDPR compliance requirement, for example, talks largely about data protection and management.
- If any violate the guidelines, the company would face a huge penalty.
3) Skilled resources
Most times, multiple clouds will require the team to possess unique skill sets. The more the volume of SaaS or IaaS solutions deployed, the more versatile the skills required become. While engaging with multiple vendors may imply reaping very specialized advantages, it is important to find skilled generalists who will be able to successfully deploy workloads on any cloud provider. This is a major challenge faced by companies of all sizes.
- According to a Study by VMWare, 62% of the IT professionals find it challenging to migrate from the legacy system to the multicloud setup.
- Understanding and adapting to the new technology remains to be one of the top challenges for the resources.
- To find skilled resources in a limited budget, while reducing training costs while trying to flatten the learning curve, is like a complicated scavenger hunt.
Multi cloud management solutions:
However, the role of technology in enterprises is exploding with each passing day. Suppose if the dev team prefers deploying apps on cloud X, while the testing team may prefer working on cloud Y, and whereas the enterprise IT team could have all the apps live on a different cloud Z, it is now possible with a multi cloud environment.
Private cloud is like buying furniture from IKEA, where they will provide us with all the software components and provide support post purchase. Whereas, multi cloud is like buying different furniture from various public vendors like AWS, Azure or GCP all managed under one hood.
- Multi cloud protects enterprises from blackouts – If one service provider fails for a period, being on multiple clouds having the option of scalable backups—meaning the BC-DR plan is always in place.
- Affordability – As with multi cloud integration, the companies are not bound to a particular vendor, hence they can choose various vendor services for each cloud for better cost optimization.
- Multi Cloud Security – Implementing a confidential computing to protect the sensitive cloud data and integrating a centralized security strategy with security protocol is essential. To scale up the security, third-party automation services help tremendously.
- Deployment Management platforms – Choose an end-end deployment platform that helps to manage and control the multi cloud environments with deployment statistics insights like deployment velocity, any failure rates.
Wrapping Up
Enterprises mainly focus on the multi cloud deployment tools which helps to streamline an automated application release with improved collaboration, accelerate the dev teams in delivering ready-to-market products, mitigate the risks with more customized solutions and deploy even complex hybrid applications in a safe and secured way.
Using a hybrid cloud deployment platform to integrate the applications into a multi cloud environment not only facilitates automating the various cloud deployments but also provides a continuous deployment strategy with powerful pipeline capabilities.
Should you go multi cloud? Yes! You should. Major global cloud providers offering multi cloud support like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform for a significant multi cloud implementation. Why not be an early adopter and muscle up your competitive edge?