Adopting a multi-cloud approach is an imperative for organizations in today’s fast-paced competitive environment to boost their business agility. A multi-cloud strategy is defined as one in which an organization depends on multiple cloud vendors or providers.

Essentially, the objective is to avoid dependence on one particular vendor, helping organizations optimize their IT infrastructure and cost, enhance flexibility and mitigate risks. This article discusses the multi-cloud strategy, its benefits, challenges and its impact on business agility.

From Single Cloud to Multi-Cloud

Driven by the growing demand from businesses for a more agile and adaptive environment to host their workloads, cloud computing has transitioned from a relatively straightforward, single-cloud approach to a more complex, distributed model that offers enhanced flexibility and scalability.

The traditional single-cloud model, while easy to manage, often results in vendor lock-in and limited flexibility. Traditional cloud platforms often have several constraints, such as difficulty or restricted ability to scale and inadequate disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

What Is a Multi-Cloud Approach and Why Do We Need It?

A multi-cloud strategy encompasses one or more services offered by different cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP), thereby providing businesses with the flexibility to deploy software applications across any cloud at an optimal cost, ultimately driving business agility.

A multi-cloud environment differs from a hybrid cloud strategy because it uses two or more existing cloud computing systems, such as a combination of software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), for data analytics or data storage at optimal costs.

Organizations can enhance system performance by strategically redistributing workloads across multiple cloud environments to create faster, lower-latency connections. As a result, organizations can ensure uninterrupted business continuity even during downtimes and prevent other cloud services from being impacted by outages. Businesses can also employ resource monitoring and leverage competitive pricing from multiple suppliers.

Benefits of Multi-Cloud Deployments

Today’s businesses have been adopting multi-cloud strategies quickly for several reasons, which are discussed in this section.

Cost Optimization

Businesses can leverage a multi-cloud approach to optimize costs and reduce the total cost of ownership while simultaneously taking advantage of the best pricing and performance across various providers. Organizations can strategically select providers that offer the best value while still balancing cost, performance and efficiency, and lower their expenses through autoscaling and rightsizing.

Optimized Performance

By adopting a multi-cloud approach, organizations can extend their networks to multiple cloud providers, allowing for the distribution of services across different geographies, resulting in quicker load times and adherence to region-specific regulations. Organizations can build a low-latency infrastructure with a multi-cloud strategy, improving application efficiency, user experience and response time while reducing costs.

Vendor Lock-In

One of the most significant drawbacks of using a single cloud is vendor lock-in due to dependence on a single provider. When adopting this approach, businesses often depend on the pricing, service-level agreements (SLAs) and vendor ecosystem they have opted for, which can lead to inflexibility, increased pricing and strategic risk.

Better Flexibility

On the contrary, organizations can negotiate better contracts and reduce dependency on a single provider. With a multi-cloud approach, organizations are not dependent on a single provider; instead, they can select one or more cloud vendors based on specific requirements. A multi-cloud strategy enables greater control over infrastructure, improved autonomy and more flexible terms.

Enhanced Resilience and Availability

Using multiple vendors may increase uptime and redundancy. If one of the cloud provider platforms goes down, the organization can easily switch to another, ensuring that its business operations continue uninterrupted. Adopting a multi-cloud strategy may help businesses achieve better failover options, improved disaster recovery and enhanced security.

Challenges in Multi-Cloud Deployments

Typically, you may have to handle several challenges in a multi-cloud platform, such as increased complexity, security concerns, cost management and knowledge gaps. Despite the benefits, there are several challenges associated with using multi-cloud deployments as well:

Complexity in Cloud Cost Management

In a multi-cloud environment, you’ll typically have multiple cloud providers, each with its own billing system and usage patterns, making it challenging to manage and optimize costs. However, you can take advantage of cloud cost management tools (AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Advisor, etc.) to help you mitigate this challenge.

Data Privacy and Security Concerns

Another key challenge in a multi-cloud environment is data privacy and security. Since there are multiple clouds, it is challenging to keep your data safe and secure while adhering to compliance regulations and standards.

Data Integrity and Consistency

Since data is spread across multiple cloud platforms, data synchronization and integrity can be major challenges because of latency issues, inconsistencies and related factors.

Difficulty in Monitoring Performance

With multiple cloud providers, data is spread across multiple cloud environments, making it difficult to maintain a unified security posture and monitor performance, as each cloud provider uses its own metrics, tools and dashboards to measure and track performance.

Skills Gap

A knowledge gap or lack of proficiency in the cloud platforms in use is yet another challenge. Team members should have knowledge of each cloud platform in use, making it necessary to organize training programs on a regular basis.

Best Practices

Here are some of the key practices you should keep in mind when working with a multi-cloud platform:

• Set clear goals and strategies.
• Monitor performance regularly.
• Keep an eye on platform security.
• Conduct performance and security audits on a regular basis.

The Future of Multi-Cloud

Adopting a multi-cloud approach can unlock new opportunities for an organization by encouraging innovation. Organizations become more responsive, more innovative and more resilient to downtime or disruptions. The demand for lower latency and real-time data analysis will propel the popularity, growth and adaptability of edge computing.

As a result, businesses will be able to optimize application performance by processing data closer to the data source, i.e., where the data is produced. In the next few years, the adaptability of multi-cloud platforms will be further boosted and transformed by AI and ML as they work to decrease costs and boost performance.

Takeaways

• While a multi-cloud approach has challenges, the potential for unparalleled business agility and strong governance is invaluable.
• The reward is boundless agility and the ability to seize potential opportunities without the constraints of legacy infrastructure.
• Running workloads on two or more clouds helps enhance business agility and avoid vendor lock-in, meaning, businesses are no longer tied to a single vendor.
• A multi-cloud platform enables businesses to scale their workloads elegantly.
• A multi-cloud approach can be a game changer for businesses — helping them optimize resources and reduce costs.