Multicloud (also known as multi-cloud) refers to business operations spread across multiple clouds and different cloud service providers.
Depending on an organization’s end goals, a multicloud strategy requires the adoption of one or more infrastructure, platform and software as a service (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) respectively.
By opting for a multi-cloud approach, companies can select the best cloud service provider for each specific workload.
A company may find that one solution provider offers a superior email package, while another is better suited to handle workloads with compliance or performance requirements.
There are good reasons to adopt this approach. A multicloud strategy allows organizations to avoid vendor lock-in and select the best cloud services to meet the requirements of a particular application or workload.
Companies can choose cost-optimized services and leverage geographically dispersed clouds to meet data sovereignty requirements and improve user experience.
The multicloud model also provides redundancy that reduces the risk of downtime. While cloud service provider outages are not as common and widespread as they once were, the potential risk to customers is greater than ever.
As organizations continue to migrate more mission-critical workloads to the cloud, an outage or performance degradation can severely cripple their operations.
Defining a multi-cloud strategy
A multicloud strategy defines the following:
- How the company will decide which clouds to use for which purposes, including public and private clouds and all types of cloud platform, i.e. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS;
- How cloud offerings will fit with each other and with local offerings;
- How the company will decide where data can and should stay;
- How the company will use and protect access to resources and data.
As with any technology strategy, to reap the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy, it must be based on business requirements and technology principles.
These business requirements may include reducing capital costs and varying Opex(Operational Expenditure). Operational Expenditure) and the elimination of customer-perceived service interruptions. and the elimination of customer-perceived service disruptions.
These services can vary significantly across sectors and organizations, both in content and priority. For example, one company will value continuity of service to customers much more than another, even in the same sector.
Why companies should consider adopting a multicloud
A recent study by Dimensional Research, a company specializing in market research, found that 77% of companies are planning to adopt a multicloud strategy in the next two years to better meet their needs. But what are the advantages of multicloud that make it such an attractive approach?
1. Improved performance with multicloud
Many companies are choosing multiple cloud environments, combining workloads between public and private cloud service providers.
While public cloud providers have a place for many businesses, the fact that they have to serve a large number of companies can hinder their ability to provide specialized products.
These public cloud providers will offer dozens of different solution sets, covering everything from machine learning to blockchain applications. However, each has pros and cons for users.
Many customers choose their cloud service provider if they need a diverse set of tools that work as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) rather than Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Often, the limitations of cloud providers lead companies to adopt multi-vendor implementation, opening up the option to choose the “best in class”.
Companies have greater flexibility to integrate the latest technological advances by opting for a multi-cloud strategy through specialized individual providers.
2. Compliance
As data privacy regulations continue to increase, the need for businesses to maintain strict levels of compliance is growing.
Geographic locations need to be accounted for to comply with regulations, such as the General Data Protection Act (LGPD).
Aside from a company integrating its own proprietary on-premises data centers, a multi-cloud strategy is typically the most efficient and cost-effective approach.
3. Resilience
Resilience ensures that a business is able to recover information at any time, regardless of any planned or unplanned issues that may arise.
Even the most geographically dispersed cloud providers will suffer from a random outage at some point.
By being tied to a single cloud provider, companies risk having their operations paralyzed if a business-critical application becomes inaccessible.
While managing multiple clouds has its particular set of challenges, the benefits of resilience in relation to security and recovery far outweigh them.
In addition, businesses will find that multicloud provides them with the advantage, not the provider. This feature allows organizations to avoid supplier lockouts.
Reliability is also improved when multi-cloud management is used as you can transfer processes as needed when an outage occurs.
4. Maximum opportunity to optimize costs and performance
For many businesses, one of the key advantages of multicloud is the ability to select the cloud services that meet the needs of the business and the best possible price.
A multi-cloud approach will allow, for example, a business to take advantage of a particular provider’s instances and secure computing capacity at the lowest price, but also use a competitor’s low-priority virtual machines (VMs) to get the best possible price on instances.
By adopting a multi-cloud strategy, companies find it easier to optimize costs and performance.
5. The best services outside the cloud
The best service or tool for what you need may not exist within a single cloud. And if one cloud provider offers it, rarely will a tool or service work on competing clouds.
Also, when you are building an architecture for a single cloud, the easy choice is to adopt all the tools and services found in the cloud to your technology framework, even if they are not the best on the market.
For example, all cloud providers have their own tools to provide visibility on application performance, CPU usage, RAM and data storage. They even have different tools for different applications.
With a multi-cloud strategy, you can choose your favorite services and tools to run across all your clouds.
IT should also inform a multicloud strategy by considering several key factors about the technology, including whether to build or buy, use open source or proprietary software, and implement a platform for everything or a central platform with some gap fillers.
IT leadership should explicitly state the principles that guide decisions about how cloud offerings are selected and combined. They are as important in developing a multi-cloud strategy as they are in building on-premise portfolios.
About Eval
Eval has been developing projects in the financial, health, education, and industry segments for over 18 years. Since 2004, we have offered solutions for Authentication, Electronic and Digital Signature, and Data Protection. Currently, we are present in the main Brazilian banks, health institutions, schools and universities, and different industries.
With market recognized value, Eval’s solutions and services meet the highest regulatory standards for public and private organizations, such as SBIS, ITI, PCI DSS, and LGPD. In practice, we promote information security and compliance, increase companies’ operational efficiency, and reduce costs.
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