Understanding Multi-Cloud Strategy

“Multi-cloud” means multiple public clouds. A company that uses a multi-cloud deployment incorporates multiple public clouds from more than one cloud provider. Instead of a business using one vendor for cloud hosting, storage, and the full application stack, in a multi-cloud configuration they use several.

Multi-cloud deployments have a number of uses. A multi-cloud deployment can leverage multiple IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) vendors, or it could use a different vendor for IaaS, PaaS (platform-as-a-service), and SaaS (software-as-a-service) services. Multi-cloud can be purely for the purpose of redundancy and system backup, or it can incorporate different cloud vendors for different services.

By having the freedom to create a strategy that utilizes multiple vendors, you can pick and choose the capabilities that best suit your specific business needs and minimize vendor lock-in.

What are the pros and cons of using a multi-cloud strategy?

Pros:

• Best of each Cloud: Multicloud allows you to choose from many cloud vendors and provides the flexibility to match specific features and capabilities to optimize your workloads in the cloud based on factors like speed, performance, reliability, geographical location, and security and compliance requirements.

• Innovative Technology: Cloud providers constantly invest in developing new products and services. Multicloud enables you to leverage new technologies as they emerge to improve your own offerings without being limited to the choice offered by a single cloud provider.

• Reliability and Redundancy: By using a multi-cloud deployment, a business avoids putting all their eggs in one basket. If one cloud goes down, some functionality will still be available to users from the other deployed clouds. In addition, one public cloud could be used as backup to another cloud.

• Reduced vendor lock-in: A multicloud environment allows you to build anywhere, fast. With a multicloud approach, you’re not tied to a single provider. If a multi-cloud strategy is used, it’s easier to migrate away from using one of these vendors, because the majority of the infrastructure still remains in place during the migration.

• Potential cost savings: If a business does not commit to using one cloud vendor for all its infrastructure needs, it is free to pick and choose the most affordable services from different vendors.

Cons:

For all its benefits, a multicloud approach does come with potential roadblocks that some organizations find difficult to navigate.

• Complexity of management: A multi-cloud deployment means interfacing with several different vendors, each with different processes and technology. In addition, it becomes harder to have complete visibility into the technology stack with data stored and processes running in multiple clouds.

• Increased latency: If services in multiple clouds need to talk to one another in order to fulfill user requests, that can introduce latency, depending on how tightly the clouds are integrated, and how often multiple clouds need to interact.

• Performance and reliability: It can be difficult to balance loads across different clouds, especially if the data centers are very far apart geographically.