10 Key Benefits of Adopting Multi-Cloud Strategy for Your Business

Organizations are offloading on-premises IT resources to the cloud, and this has created a huge demand for public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, VMWare, GCP, and many others. Researchers have reported a 23% surge in end-user spending in the cloud during 2021. Also, this research indicates that more than 70% of organizations already using the cloud are increasing their investments in cloud technologies. According to a recent Gartner’s report, global end-user spending on Public Cloud Services is expected to exceed $480 Billion in 2022. Moreover, organizations are adopting a multi-cloud strategy as it helps for better data backups on public and private clouds with data analytics capability. This post throws light on 10 key benefits for businesses adopting a multi-cloud strategy along with other useful information about multi-cloud management tools and monitoring tools and limitations or disadvantages of a multi-cloud.

What is Multi-Cloud?

Multi-cloud is a deployment model of having an organization’s IT resources on cloud platforms of different vendors.

A multi-cloud approach helps organizations to support their business, technology, and service requirements effectively without over-reliance on a single cloud provider. 

Embracing Multi-Cloud Architecture

Embracing multi-cloud architecture helps organizations in the distribution of cloud assets, applications, and software that includes Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions across different environments.

What is Multi-Cloud Strategy?

Three popular multi-cloud management strategies are followed by a majority of the organizations and they are: 

1. Standardization 
2. Monitoring Consolidations 
3. Management Consolidation  

 Standardization helps to follow a uniform standard while deploying resources on multi-cloud platforms. This assures little rework through minimal incompatibilities amongst resources of different vendors. Commonly applicable standardization steps are: 

• Implementing Containers with Kubernetes 
• Ensuring multi-cloud storage is compatible with Amazon S3 
• Ensuring Virtualization Machines are in Open Virtualization Format (OVF) 

 Management Consolidation is the method of developing a single-point dashboard interface for streamlining the operations between various cloud platforms. Managing multiple cloud platforms through a dashboard eases the implementation of a multi-cloud strategy. 

Popular multi-cloud management tools are: 

• BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management 
• Embotics Commander 
• Flexera (RightScale) Cloud Management Platform 
• HyperGrid 

• Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Management 
• Morpheus 
• Scalr 
• VMware CloudHealth 

 Monitoring Consolidations 

Though in a multi-cloud environment, different cloud providers provide monitoring tools to track their infrastructure implementing a single monitoring tool handling dashboards of different cloud providers always helps to minimize latency. Popularly known monitoring tools are: 

• Microsoft Cloud Monitoring  
• Amazon CloudWatch 
• BMC TrueSight Pulse AppDynamics 
• DX Infrastructure Manager 

When Should a Business use Multi-Cloud?

In the current context, different cloud providers perform certain tasks exceptionally well. So, to reap the best features from multiple cloud providers organizations are going for a multi-cloud strategy. Additionally, Multi-Cloud environments help to mitigate disasters, ensure compliance readiness, and avoid vendor lock-in situations. 

10 Salient Multi-Cloud Benefits

Next, let us focus on the important benefits businesses can obtain by having a multi-cloud strategy. 

1. Opportunity to Choose the Best-in-Industry Multi-Cloud Providers
2. Mitigate Risk of Vendor Lock-in 
3. Competitive Pricing 
4. Brings Agility to IT Ecosystem  
5. Reinforce Resilience 
6. Better Flexibility and Scalability 
7. Reap the Benefits of Robust Security Features 
8. Fostering Network Performance  
9. Improvised Risk Management 
10. Drives Innovation

1. Opportunity to Choose the Best-in-Industry Multi-Cloud Providers

The multi-cloud strategy primarily helps to choose the best services from different cloud service providers without any compromise. For instance, ‘A’-Cloud provider might be reputed for offering better upload speed and ‘B’-Cloud provider might have prowess in offering best Service Level Agreements (SLA). So, from your organization’s perspective, it is better to go for a multi-cloud strategy and extract the best features from both providers. 

2. Mitigate Risk of Vendor Lock-in

Avoiding pitfalls is difficult if your organization doesn’t carefully evaluate the terms & conditions before entering into an agreement with a cloud service provider. It is always advisable to carefully evaluate the rules related to costs and add-ons first. Having a multi-cloud strategy helps your organization to be in a better negotiation position and it also helps to choose alternative cloud providers mitigating Vendor Lock-in risks.

3. Competitive Pricing

More the number of players in the market is better for the customer as it leads to competitive pricing. Your organization can choose between the services offered by multiple cloud providers and negotiate based on vendor offerings like payment flexibility, adjustable contracts, customizable capacity, etc.  

4. Brings Agility to IT Ecosystem

Implementing a multi-cloud strategy is a complex task and many organizations often struggle with legacy IT systems, on-premises resources, and hardware suppliers. Striking a deal with the right cloud service provider like CloudThat with expertise in orchestrating multi-cloud infrastructure is key to bringing agility to your IT ecosystem. By ensuring the availability of the right expertise your organization can accomplish workload mobility and agility between heterogeneous cloud platforms.

5. Reinforce Resilience

A multi-cloud strategy always helps to have a resilient system that is more secure with disaster recovery capabilities, disk failure, power outage, or any form of glitches during natural calamities. A multi-cloud strategy always helps to replicate your IT resources and save in a location away from the disaster-affected location.

6. Better Flexibility and Scalability

Opting for a multi-cloud strategy always gives the flexibility of automation and real-time syncing of data. Moreover, a multi-cloud environment brings in better scalability by helping your organization to either scale up or scale down storage requirements based on the demand.

7. Reap the Benefits of Robust Security Features

As the cloud service providers are responsible for the security of their infrastructure, they will also ensure the security of your organizational data resources. It is always important for your organizational IT staff to assess the changing security requirements of your networks as your cloud infrastructure and software change over time. This is where building a strong in-house IT team through upskilling programs offered by authorized training partners of renowned public cloud providers like Azure and AWS and GCP plays a vital role in embracing a multi-cloud strategy.

8. Fostering Network Performance

Embracing a multi-cloud strategy allows having low latency, high-speed infrastructure at a reduced cost. Also, it helps to have a better response time and user experience. Importantly, an optimized interconnection is feasible through the creation of fast, private links between the multiple cloud providers.  

9. Improvised Risk Management

Adopting a multi-cloud strategy brings the benefit of enhanced risk management. For instance, if any cloud provider’s infrastructure is under attack or if it melts down you can easily replicate the resources on another vendor’s cloud environment and mitigate risk through redundant, independent systems offering robust authentication mechanisms, vulnerability testing, and API assets consolidation. 

10. Drives Innovation

By automating the entire process of multi-cloud management steps your organization can reap the benefits of innovation through coordination of disparate workloads, effective management of hybrid workflows, and implementation of DevOps practices.

How CloudThat Helps Businesses to Implement Multi-Cloud Environments

CloudThat renowned as a cloud-agnostic spearhead helps your organization to implement a multi-cloud strategy through its consulting services that offer all-encompassing cloud solutions. Concurrently cloud training offerings to corporates can enable your IT workforce to be Cloud Ready. Upskilling your workforce to implement robust cloud security features, risk management and innovate with best DevOps practices by mastering AWS, Azure, and GCP cloud platforms by getting trained through our industry-certified trainers with exposure to real-world use cases and hands-on lab sessions on the industry-specific curriculum of leading public cloud providers like AWS and Azure helps to strategize multi-cloud environment with precision.