What is Multi-Cloud? | An Overview of Multi-Cloud Computing

Introduction 

Multi-Cloud is a popular model of cloud computing nowadays because it is a combination of two or more public or private, or both clouds that manage service providers.

What is the Multi-Cloud? 

Multi-Cloud is the combination of cloud services, which may be hosted on private cloud, public cloud, or on-premises resources. In simple language no single cloud vendor when we include the term Multi-Cloud.  

Multi-Cloud has a combination of public clouds where an organization must decide which provider they have to choose like Microsoft Azure, Amazon web services, IBM, and Google Cloud Services. For example, an organization can choose a mixed cloud for their services like AWS for high availability, scalability (for disaster recovery), Azure for business analytics and management, and GCP for coding, testing, and development. 

Multi-Cloud can be a combination of Infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS), Platform-as-a-services (PAAS), and Software-as-a-services (SAAS) deployments.  

With the help of Multi-Cloud, an organization can choose the best service from each cloud provider for effective use or services to manage costs, geographical availability, other requirements, and more. There are many benefits of Multi-Cloud for any organization that provides strength to business by stabilizing the continuity of the organization by full filling needs.

Why Multi-Cloud strategies? 

The major reason to use the Multi-Cloud strategy is that organizations can optimize performance, control costs, and utilize the best cloud technologies from two or more vendors. 

Many companies first move into the cloud with small services and applications at first but as they grow, they need a cleanup cloud sprawl, for which they come up with a multi-cloud strategy.
Strategizing the Multi-Cloud strategy means to reflect what are the needs and vendors’ alignment with the best options.

A Multi-Cloud strategy helps organizations to boost the efficiency of their spending and increase the accuracy of business operations by choosing the best services from each provider for each term or use case.
Multi-Cloud involves great security majors because of more than one vendor which provides more stability, security, and availability as a cloud user gets to point out factors like Monitoring and visibility, Upgradation, Authorization, Authentication, Policies, and Compliance Across clouds and Consolidate Monitoring.  

We can implement an automation configuration management tool that can avoid error checking and security monitoring to catch and fix it because migrating workload in the cloud may lead to making many migrations errors and it increases in Multi-Cloud. This is because the organization working on a single cloud frequently updates their application which ultimately increases their investment and tends to transfer from one cloud to another. By using Multi-Cloud, the migration or transfer of organization between clouds became easy and provided the advantage of new tech from different providers that they choose.

There are many reasons why the Multi-Cloud strategy totally varies as per the requirement of organizations that they can choose for best options from each cloud provider, for managing Multi-Cloud because each organization’s use case will be unique. 

There are basically two types of homogenous and heterogenous clouds:
A homogenous cloud includes several different clouds but the same vendor.
A heterogeneous cloud could mean three public clouds from three vendors. 

Benefits of a Multi-Cloud environment 

The process of switching to a new system can seem daunting. In general, businesses are concerned about the security of their data when it is handed over to unknown entities.
Some of the reasons that organizations use Multi-Cloud are:   

Avoid vendor lock-in 

Organizations that deployed their application or resources on a single cloud provider have faced some hard times transferring the business from one service to another. This is because the organization is working on a single cloud frequently updating their application makes the organization increase their investment that tends to make transferring one cloud to another difficult.  

But if an organization is already using Multi-Cloud that the migration or transfer of organization between clouds became easy and provided the advantage of new tech from different providers that they choose. 

Improve Disaster Recovery 

Better backups and better backup access are possible with Multi-Cloud backups. If one cloud service goes down, you can still rely on other providers to protect your data. 

Decrease Capital Expenditure

A data center requires a lot of infrastructures, hardware, and power supplies. The cost of buying these items outright is high. A larger number of these means less capital available for day-to-day business operations.
By using Multi-Cloud, you can free up CapEx (Capital Expenditure) spending in favor of more flexible OpEx (Operational Expenditure) spending. 

Better Security Options

As we know, cloud providers are responsible for their own infrastructure, they always make sure to have all capabilities to protect your data as well. As your infrastructure and software change over time, your network’s security must be evaluated regularly. 

Risk Management

Multi-Cloud strategies offer the benefit of risk management as well. The user of a Multi-Cloud can quickly switch from one cloud provider to another if one experiences a system meltdown or an attack.
Multi-Cloud helps organizations mitigate risk by utilizing redundant, independent systems that provide robust authentication mechanisms and vulnerability testing, and more. 

Reduce latency 

Other strategies that are useful for Multi-Cloud organizational users like optimizing workloads because of the new feature they used for each service provider that leads to enhancing the performance of the application, improving latency also boosts cost-efficiency. 

Proximity  

Proximity Cloud offers a high-performance, private environment and connectivity to capital market counterparties and public cloud providers.  

Challenges of Multi-Cloud 

Today, almost all enterprises are using Multi-Cloud to improve productivity and performance, reduce cost, and prevent vendor lock-in. However, there is a drawback of Multi-Cloud because of the increasing set of tools and processes of different cloud providers which increases the management complexity.
Organizations can face some issues while establishing the Multi-Cloud infrastructure like:

User Access controls 

Multi-Cloud makes access control management more complex. Because it involves multiple user access control across systems simultaneously. Tracking and keeping policies in check became more complex.

Data governance

As an organization, processing a large set of data is a monumental challenge in any environment. When an organization uses Multi-Cloud, it becomes more challenging. We need to ensure that your data is accessible to the user and application who need to keep it secure for that purpose we need proper robust data governance strategies.

Configuration errors 

One of the biggest issues in the migration of workload to the cloud is the configuration of privacy and security settings.
Multi-cloud strategies increase this difficulty exponentially as your IT team is tasked with keeping multiple platforms connected and ensuring they can securely communicate with one another.

Increased complexity 

Hidden costs of Multi-Cloud computing can be increased complexity. Because every cloud has different Servies, for example, GCP has six load balancers and AWS has three, each of them performs differently, which may increase the complexity to make use of resources.

Increased requirement for Multi-Cloud Experts

Organizations need Multi-Cloud experts to manage complex cloud infrastructure. They should understand processes, structures, and deployment strategies.
The roles that are mainly focused on Cloud infrastructure are Cloud Architect, Cloud Security Engineer/Manager, Cloud Developer, Cloud Network Engineer, and  Cloud Automation Engineer.

Conclusion

Multi-Cloud is one of the best ways through which an organization can achieve its goals with many benefits and can fulfill its requirements. 

The organizations using private and public cloud services are dependent on the goals and their application dependencies. Most of the vendors are using a combination of public and private cloud services. There is a way to use hybrid cloud services but there are some separate and useful benefits that make Multi-Cloud services a better option to use Multi-Cloud services.

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