Cloud computing might promise cheap, abundant storage, and computing you don’t have to deal with yourself, when in reality, the cloud market is so diverse now that every provider has their benefits, trade offs, and their own pricing models.
So, it’s understandable that a business might not be totally pleased with their current provider, or you may be reading this article because you don’t know how to choose just one.
Luckily, a multi-cloud strategy can give you the best of several cloud service providers. Keep reading to learn the pros and cons of this approach.
What Is a Multi-Cloud Strategy?
A multi-cloud strategy uses multiple cloud computing services from various providers, which gives businesses more options around the tools they want to use for different jobs. Those services include public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud solutions.
Businesses might choose to do this because of the security and compliance requirements, but benefits also include cost efficiency, redundancy, and scalability. Let’s go over those benefits and some challenges in more detail.
Advantages of Implementing a Multi-Cloud Strategy
Flexibility
Providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud all have their own solutions with their own benefits and drawbacks. If you choose any one provider, you’re going to make some kind of tradeoff for the sake of key business objectives.
With multiple vendors, you don’t have to make as many choices. One might get you better pricing, while another’s location will give you better service to customers in area code 832.
By going multi-cloud, you’re able to take advantage of each vendor’s unique benefits, including cloud solutions for independent software vendors.
Cost efficiency
A multi-cloud solution is a great cost-reduction measure, too. Different vendors will have different fees and pricing models: annual subscriptions, per-user pricing, pay-as-you-go, etc.
With multi-cloud, you can shift compute-heavy workloads to the vendors who give you a good deal on processing, then store all your data on the provider who’s almost giving storage away.
Economizing between different vendors for your different needs can cut down the total cost of ownership for your entire cloud computing portfolio. If vendors know you’re doing this and you’re potentially a big client, they might be willing to negotiate a better price with you if it means getting more of your business.
Reduced risk and easier compliance
Spreading your computing needs across different cloud service providers can help de-risk your entire digital operation. If you’re running your whole business on one third-party provider, your organization has a single point of failure. A multi-cloud environment creates redundancy in your system so that if one provider goes down, some or all of your operations can still run intact.
Some cloud providers will be more secure than others, and if you’re working in a regulated sector, you might be required to store your data with certain security protocols in place.
With a multi-cloud solution, you can store your data with the most secure provider while doing your intensive data analysis where it’s cheaper or where the infrastructure is built for tasks like machine learning.
Performance enhancement and localization
Multi-cloud unlocks several ways to improve performance across your whole digital operation.
Different cloud infrastructure providers have different strengths and weaknesses. Some have designed their high-speed infrastructure from the ground up to efficiently handle machine learning tasks, while others might boast of their best-in-class security or cheap storage. So, when considering a multi-cloud strategy, it’s essential to assess each provider’s cloud infrastructure capabilities.
Time and time again, businesses will be forced to pick subpar performance for the sake of security or cost-efficiency. With a multi-cloud solution, you’re free to run your most intensive computing tasks, like data transformation or analysis, on the machine that’s best suited for it.
Another site of performance gains is in the physical location of different servers. One benefit of content delivery networks (CDNs) is that they have servers all over the world, which enables them to store copies of images and videos closer to the user.
Where is area code 747 getting your content from? If you’re growing your business regionally and want to expand to an area like the San Fernando Valley, measures like area-code phone numbers and having servers nearby are something to keep an eye on.
With a multi-cloud approach, you can make sure you have servers close to your most valuable customers. This helps you deliver faster and more reliable service to them online, whether it’s faster content delivery or VoIP features on your customer support line.
Challenges and Risks of a Multi-Cloud Strategy
Security concerns
Cyber security and compliance need to be top-of-mind when looking into any cloud vendor. It’s a lot to think about: everything from data encryption on the provider’s end to device access control in your business need to be taken into account.
While any one cloud provider might be subject to regular audits and sell themselves on best-in-class security architectures, they don’t have as much insight into what their competitors are doing. If you’re using a multi-cloud approach, you’ve made your security profile much more complicated and disjointed: there’s no one person who understands 100% of the system.
Vendor lock-in and transition challenges
Avoiding vendor lock-in is touted as one of the benefits of a multi-cloud approach, but even in this approach, it could be a thorn in your side. If you’re dependent on a single vendor for one part of your business, they’re not going to be keen on helping you migrate to a competitor.
Transitioning from a legacy system to one or more cloud platforms has its own challenges aside from that. They’re costly and time-consuming headaches to solve. This is where solutions like OpenLegacy come in. Rather than forcing businesses to transition all at once, these hybrid cloud providers let businesses keep one foot in the old system.
This lets them migrate at a pace that suits them and helps them squeeze the remaining value out of existing systems and contracts, all while ensuring there’s no disruption in day-to-day operations.
Key Takeaway
Cloud environments have a lot of advantages for businesses, but using one single cloud provider comes with serious tradeoffs. With a multi-cloud strategy, businesses can enjoy the best of cloud computing while mitigating some of the drawbacks.
##
