How a multicloud strategy multiplies your technological edge

“Cloud” continues to be a buzzword, more than a decade after it first became the hot topic in the technology world. Startups, SMBs, and enterprises have been able to benefit tremendously from the lower costs of using a public cloud. Affordability, convenience, state-of-the-art technology, and scalability — that’s the cloud’s proposition and it’s too good to resist. There’s more to it, though, particularly because of the battles of the giants in the cloud computing space. Google’s BigQuery or AWS RedShift — whose performance is more trustworthy? Microsoft’s Azure blobs or AWS S3 object storage — which one’s more affordable in the long run? Let’s face it, there’s an overload of choices. Also, organizations have matured and understand cloud computing as well as the different service models. Which one do you choose? How do you make sure you get the best of all worlds? How do you prevent vendor lock-in? How do you negotiate for better workload mobility? A multicloud strategy — that’s the answer. In spite of all the challenges associated with multicloud strategies, they continue to be a game changer and driver of a competitive edge in technology for several businesses across industries.

Lower dependency on single cloud vendor

multicloud strategy
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The autonomy of on-premises systems is a very clear benefit that keeps enterprises glued to their current infrastructure. Invariably, adopting the public cloud model means that you become dependent on a single cloud vendor for most of your company’s IT infrastructure requirements. This kind of lock-in is always best to avoid.

A multicloud strategy offers a solution where a company uses infrastructure services of a number of cloud solution providers. This gives the organization a sense of control and autonomy in fine-tuning the overall cloud strategy.

For managed service provides with massive cloud presence, this strategy becomes a great enabler for better negotiations with vendors. Because your cloud infrastructure is now flexible, you can move workloads around to get the best fit in terms of cost, flexibility, and service quality.

Best performance for different workloads

Different cloud service providers excel at specific performance measures. Google, for instance, is renowned for its quick-launch capability. AWS positions itself as an end-to-end and comprehensive instance portfolio.

A multicloud strategy helps you balance out your costs and the performance you get. IT always has high-priority workloads that demand nothing but the best infrastructure service. Then, there are low-priority workloads that don’t justify similar costs.

With a wide range of cloud infrastructure services available across an entire spectrum of price ranges, IT departments can judiciously build a portfolio of cloud solutions that deliver the best ROIs

Risk mitigation via cloud collaboration

In spite of the clear benefits of the public cloud, the discussion around securities risks of the decision hasn’t slowed down. And that’s expected too; hosting all your mission-critical workloads in a single offsite cloud unit could potentially cripple your business in case of a natural disaster or targeted cyberattack.

Multicloud offers a highly collaborative model for IT departments to mitigate all these risks. Three of the most noteworthy risk-mitigation benefits delivered by multicloud architecture are as follows:

  • Better and quicker disaster recovery.
  • Low cost and highly reliable redundancy solutions.
  • Fewer single points of failure.

Isolation of infrastructure components leads to isolation of the negative impact of a potentially systemwide disruption. This alone makes multicloud a great option for enterprises looking to bolster their digital assets’ security.

Security and resilience against DDoS attacks

multicloud strategy
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one where several computer systems swamp a particular network resource (such as a website, a web server, or a cloud hosting unit) with requests, to the extent that genuine requests from web-hosting users return a denial of service message. A competitor, an individual hacker, or a group of hackers can launch a DDoS attack on your cloud resource. This could take down all your web applications and websites based on that cloud unit.

DDoS attacks are surprisingly common and continue to cost businesses thousands of dollars in downtime every year. By adopting a multicloud architecture for your web applications and websites, you can bolster their resilience against DDoS attacks. If one cloud unit is swamped with DDoS blitzkrieg of requests, you can move the workload around to another cloud unit.

Managing licensing restrictions

This one ties back to the cost advantage aspects of the multicloud architecture. Several cloud providers out there let you move from your on-premises technology contract to the cloud model without requiring any new licenses. Some, however, require you to purchase new cloud-specific licenses during this move.

Take for instance a SQL server that you need to provision via the cloud; you will then need to bear the costs of onboarding your licenses with the cloud service provider. In a multicloud model, you don’t have to stick with such a restrictive cloud service player. Once you understand the licensing restrictions imposed by different cloud service providers, you can take the best decisions by choosing vendors that help you overcome these restrictions.

Easier compliance with business policies

The evolving nature of business policies and government regulations related to storage of data and provisioning of computing requirements means that enterprises need more options than ever. Some enterprises, for instance, prefer to migrate Microsoft applications only to Azure.

Then, there are industry-specific restrictions that require enterprises to store sensitive consumer information only in a certain manner and at a certain location. While deciding which workloads to migrate to which cloud, you ideally need options to be able to make the best decisions. Multicloud architecture opens these gateways for you.

Multicloud gives you a competitive edge

Cloud computing’s benefits are being embraced across industries. Today, the competitive edge is all about building the right portfolio of cloud-powered technologies. The multicloud model offers enterprises a methodical way to achieve this. Explore the relevance of the multicloud model benefits for your company, and start your journey towards the next level of cloud-powered IT.

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