What is Multi-Cloud ?
As many organizations shift their IT infrastructure and services to the cloud, they are increasingly considering adopting a multi-cloud strategy. So what is multi-cloud? What challenges or benefits does it provide?
Depending on the applications and business needs, an organization may need to spread out their application workloads over multi-cloud environments. Some examples of needs include
· Supporting growth objectives while controlling IT costs
· Keeping old, custom apps alive
· Supporting line of business rapid app development/deployment
· Delivering on application performance guarantees and uptime resilience metrics
· Generally being able to deliver the business flexibility — the ability to mix and match PaaS, SaaS or even IaaS workloads when required
For instance, let’s examine a multi-cloud environment for a large services organization that depends heavily on its IT infrastructure for its daily operation:
Private cloud and legacy servers on-premise:
The organization uses a private cloud and legacy servers in an on-premise environment to host highly sensitive applications for which data must be kept onsite due to regulations or other imperatives. This private cloud/legacy environment is running custom applications some of which were written decades ago, maintaining detailed customer records. These applications are managed by in-house IT and some run on legacy systems and some may utilize modern cloud technologies to enable agility.
SaaS apps in the Public cloud:
Simultaneously, the organization needs to minimize its in-house IT costs and resources so they use a public cloud (AWS and Azure) to host their in-house developed customer facing online mobile and desktop applications. The same organization uses third party SaaS apps, such as HR benefits processing, payroll processing and marketing (e.g. Workday, Salesforce, Hubspot CRM management) which are publicly available SaaS apps hosted by multiple providers in the cloud.
PaaS in the private cloud:
The organization also uses a big data analysis function which is outsourced to a service provider (e.g. HPE GreenLake). This runs Hadoop and Cloudera in a private off-premise cloud environment. Platform as a Service (PaaS) functions similarly to SaaS but the customer manages their own applications and data. The cloud provider manages servers, storage, virtualization, networking, runtime, operating system etc.
All of these application workloads exist in a multi cloud environment. This brings with it several challenges.
Challenges:
Complexity and Management
Companies which adopt a multi-cloud strategy have fragmented visibility and management control across it all. It’s not easy to understand who is doing what, where and when. It is also hard to monitor the uptime and availability of multiple cloud services in a single view and ensure security and compliance at the myriad of vulnerable points of failure and security breach.
Security
It can be difficult to secure a multi-cloud environment because of a lack of visibility across hosts and services which might reside in various different providers. What is the one common thread in all these scenarios? Data!! The most important aspect of managing security is protecting sensitive organizational data as it flows from application to application across many boundaries, in private, on-premise or public and private off-premise environments.
Why do it?
So this raises the question. Why do it if it’s going to be riskier? There are plenty of benefits to justify the multi-cloud approach:
Benefits:
The strongest benefits are flexibility and meeting more precisely, the broad needs of an organization without getting locked into one vendor. In a multi-cloud strategy, instead of going to a single provider, organizations evaluate analogous offerings and select whichever meets their needs best, maximizing their options to pick and choose what works best for different application and workload needs.
On the vendor side, vendors must stay competitive with cost, quality of support and richness of services, knowing that their multi-cloud customers are not held captive and might switch, at relatively low cost to another vendor offering a better user experience for their SaaS or cloud architecture needs.
By using private, hybrid or public cloud hosting options several powerful benefits are achieved:
Performance and Reliability
A multi-cloud strategy can improve performance. If primary clouds experience performance issues or are taken down (due to planned/unplanned maintenance or a security breach), passive clouds can dynamically be activated. That redundancy provides uptime resilience and fixes performance degradation automatically and on the fly!
A multi-cloud strategy can help reduce the effect of DDoS attacks by spreading traffic and services over multiple clouds, in turn, eliminating the risk of having one point of failure.
Cost reduction (Capex becomes Opex)
There are several ways a multi-cloud strategy can ensure cost savings, one of them being the ability to convert capital expenditures into monthly operational expenditures. Costs in time and resources are also reduced due to the flexibility and agility multi-cloud offers. For instance, it can make it more difficult for hackers to take down all of an organization’s services if they are distributed across multiple clouds. This improved reliability of services as a whole can help reduce and/or eliminate downtime until the primary cloud is brought back online.
Where’s the data?
In a multi-cloud environment there are multiple instances of databases, data pipelines, and warehouses, spread out over many silos in space and time. Additionally, the data is now accessed not only by specialized information workers, but also by non technical end users, data engineers, data scientists, contractors, applications, services, and other resources. This raises the complexity of ensuring the data is protected everywhere, all the time.
Conclusion
When considering whether or not to embrace a multi-cloud strategy business/IT executives must consider the following:
The benefits of multi-cloud are generally:
· Greater organizational flexibility and agility
· Bigger cost savings
· Better performance
· Improved reliability and resilience
And the inhibitors and challenges include:
· Less visibility and control
· Harder to manage coherently across so many disparate clouds/systems
· Increased chances of security breaches
· Tougher to secure the data everywhere, at all times
As many organizations shift their IT infrastructure and services to the cloud, they are increasingly considering adopting a multi-cloud strategy. There are many different providers, service offerings and products that can enable a smooth implementation of a multi-cloud strategy. This includes enhanced security, central management and control, with enterprise visibility.
Next steps
A cross functional business and IT team can be used to help an organization better understand how their needs can be served with a multi-cloud strategy. The team can utilize simulation software for the business IT environment, running simulations with various approaches (e.g. testing different degrees of multi-cloud adoption), deploying a range of scenarios (security breach, huge influx of new users, natural disaster). This can help you decide on the most appropriate multi-cloud solution for your specific business needs.