Over 92% of the businesses have a multi-cloud strategy, out of which 80% are leveraging a hybrid cloud strategy. No doubt, cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure, AWS (Amazon Web Services), and GCP have become standard business terms. 

As it stands, most organizations are opting for multi-cloud, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the pandemic has acted as a catalyst for this surge in adoption.

Principally, multi-cloud refers to the spread of business operations across multiple cloud service providers. The reasons for adopting multi-cloud are manifold – ranging from efficient workload distribution and cost-efficiency to risk mitigation.

To that end, a multi-cloud strategy combines the services of more than one public cloud service provider to meet the business and technical needs of the organization. With this approach, businesses can select the best-in-class provider for a specific workload.

Multi-cloud Strategy Scenarios 

Depending on the business goals, a multi-cloud strategy leads to adopting one or more platforms as a service, infrastructure as a service, and software as a service platform. That said, here are a few scenarios where a multi-cloud strategy should be considered:

• To ensure compliance and manage client applications, adhere to data norms and practices in multiple geographies.

• To run agile and highly containerized platforms that cater to the latest microservices architecture. The deployments will be split under the multi-cloud strategy.

• To retain existing cloud service providers while facilitating better onboarding.

• To secure the data stack on an alternate cloud and ensure a better data resilience strategy, especially during cloud migration.

How Can Enterprises Gain Better Business Value from a Multi-cloud Strategy?

Avoid Vendor Lock-in

Vendor lock-in is not a problem with a multi-cloud strategy. This reduces vendor dependencies, thereby bringing in more control over the IT operations. More profoundly, adopting a multi-cloud strategy helps organizations avoid vendor lock-in and choose the most performance-optimized and cost-effective services for the specific application. 

Business Agility and Flexibility

The multi-cloud strategy offers infrastructure flexibility as it combines the public and private cloud services to help realize financial and operational benefits. As such, businesses can improve customer experiences, accelerate their internal processes, and adopt a systematic approach to gain a competitive advantage. 

Better Application Performance

When cloud application services are delivered from distant locations, data travels from various network nodes to reach the user. With the adoption of a multi-cloud strategy, businesses can provide better data and application performance regardless of location and, thus, help access new geographies.

Manage On-demand Needs

Businesses can quickly address their growing demands as the multi-cloud strategy brings together the capacity and performance of multiple cloud platforms allowing for smooth and consistent delivery of applications and services. As elucidated above, it eliminates the risk of relying on a single cloud service provider and avoids the unpredictable shortage that leads to dependency issues.

Enhance Disaster Recovery Capabilities

Most public cloud service providers facilitate 99.5% to 99.99% uptime, but unplanned outages still happen, and they can be very costly. With a multi-cloud strategy, organizations can respond to any unplanned outage via fail-over of workloads from one cloud to another. Businesses can leverage the trade-off between performance and cost to achieve a better disaster recovery strategy.

Low Latency

Multi-cloud helps in overcoming latency-related hurdles by bringing the data center close to the end-users. The number of server hops gets down while reducing the latency period for the requested data of users. This eliminates delays customers usually have to bear while using applications.

Innovation

Multi-cloud strategy pushes the organizations toward trying new technologies and leveraging unique features for customer benefits. Using a single cloud solution limits technology usage and sets in constraints. In contrast, a multi-cloud strategy leads to greater IT innovation and improvement of business operations.

Meet Regulatory compliance requirements

Most businesses face regulatory compliance issues in the context of data localization and residency. Adopting a multi-cloud strategy can help manage the compliance issues and data storage infrastructure concerns with regional availability.

Excellent ROI

Businesses can leverage multiple features of different cloud service providers. It helps them decide which cloud solution is best for the dynamic business needs and overcome the shortcomings of another. The best decisions can lead to significant business gains on multi-cloud investments.

The Bottom Line

Undeniably, the multi-cloud strategy offers tremendous benefits, but it is not easy to combine the services of multiple vendors under a single roof. A multi-cloud strategy entails well-defined research methods, planning, and insight into the cost structure. The right blend of these can prove to be very effective in the long run, for it can deliver improved performance, uptime, and business reliability.

Forgeahead offers customized cloud adoption solutions to help enterprises design their business strategy and processes and implement the best multi-cloud management practices. Connect with us today.