Multicloud can increase your flexibility

More and more organisations are choosing to use more than one supplier for their cloud initiatives. There are many advantages – but also some pitfalls you'll want to avoid.

Multicloud is exactly what it sounds like: instead of choosing a single public cloud provider for all your business needs, multicloud means using a mix of IaaS services from two or more cloud providers and dividing workloads between them. This allows you to select and customise services based on which ones offer the greatest flexibility, reliability, features and price.

For many organisations, the large cloud platforms' ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions are rarely the optimal choice for all parts of the business. However, they may be the right choice for a particular department or function, while completely different solutions may be needed for other departments or types of data (for example, for cloud storage of personal data, where legislation such as GDPR may require that data not be stored by companies based outside Sweden or the EU). You can also access niche functions from smaller players, which the big players either do not offer as standard or charge more for as an additional service.

When you integrate multiple clouds into your company's IT strategy, you can tailor your business needs to the best cloud providers for each individual task. For example, you may choose one cloud provider based on high upload speeds, while another provider may offer more favourable service agreements. Global players in the market may offer hundreds of different cloud services, but that doesn't mean they will be able to meet all your cloud needs, at least not in an entirely optimal way.

By choosing multiple cloud providers, you can take advantage of the best parts of each provider's services and mix and match to suit your applications, workloads, and tools. Different business units may have different requirements, where a global cloud may be ideal for one unit, while a local cloud provider may be best suited for another. Instead of adapting your processes to a single provider's offering, you have the freedom to access multiple options, each of which may offer the best fit for different parts of your business. Multinational organisations will also likely find that what is optimal for one geographic region is often not as good for another. Multicloud solves these problems.

One of the most important advantages of multicloud is avoiding lock-in effects that often occur if you only have a single cloud provider. If all your applications are built to work on a specific cloud platform, you will also be tied to that platform. This will make it difficult to switch at a later stage. The provider may have initially met your needs, but if you outgrow their cloud as your business takes off and needs to scale up, it may no longer be the optimal choice.

If you use multicloud from the outset, your developers can also create apps that work on multiple platforms, giving you maximum flexibility to take advantage of the best pricing or performance for different platforms. By avoiding lock-in, you also get maximum opportunity to optimise for cost and performance.

For many companies, one of the most important advantages of multicloud is, of course, the ability to choose cloud services that meet the company's needs at the best possible price. A multicloud strategy makes it easier to optimise both costs and performance.

You should also bear in mind that cloud providers often launch new services and change their prices. Costs may increase, or better offers may become available elsewhere. If you are locked into a single provider, you cannot quickly take advantage of better opportunities. If you choose a multicloud strategy, your organisation retains the power, not the cloud provider.

In other words, you can enjoy the freedom to compare different providers and secure the best available prices based on your specific IT needs. And because you are not limited to the terms and conditions of a single cloud provider, you can choose the best provider based on everything from contract and payment flexibility to customisable capacity and other important elements.

Multicloud can also help protect a company's critical business applications and data by offering overlapping backup and recovery capabilities in the event of a disaster, whether caused by a broken disk, power outage or natural disaster. Adding additional cloud instances (based in different geographical locations) as part of your security strategy provides a higher level of reliability, stability and security. Many risks associated with data in the cloud are also reduced with multicloud. If a provider experiences a failure or cyberattack in its infrastructure, a user with multiple clouds can quickly switch to one of their other providers or back up to a private cloud.

Organisations can often minimise latency and other performance issues by choosing a cloud provider with data centres located geographically close by, as performance generally correlates with the number of network hops between servers. By using multiple providers, you can take advantage of proximity and use fast, low-latency connections to significantly improve application response times and thereby provide a better user experience. Optimised network performance and smooth traffic flow are most easily achieved through faster connections between multiple cloud service providers. For companies with a large number of cloud-based workloads, the optimal solution is therefore likely to involve multiple cloud providers.

It may also be worth mentioning that many companies already use multicloud without knowing it. So-called shadow IT is a term for technology adopted by individuals or business units independently of the IT department. And the scope of such shadow IT can be unimaginably large. In McAfee's ‘2019 Cloud Adoption and Risk Report’, 1,400 IT managers in eleven countries were asked to estimate the total number of cloud services used in their organisations. They reported an average of 31 – the actual average was 1,935 cloud services! By officially implementing a multicloud strategy, you can also gain a better overview of everything that is being used – to ensure compatibility and security.

As you can see, there are very clear advantages to multicloud, but no cloud strategy is perfect in every respect – there are sometimes disadvantages to consider.

One disadvantage of spreading your workloads, applications, and data across multiple platforms is security. As mentioned above, there are many advantages to not putting all your eggs in one basket, but with multiple cloud platforms, there can also be increased complexity that can make it more difficult to secure your data. For example, you may have to spend more time and effort ensuring that you have equivalent security on all platforms used.

Multicloud can add complexity to your organisation's IT landscape – not least because the more providers you use, the more difficult it becomes to maintain an overview and monitor cloud environments. So even if you take advantage of opportunities to save on costs, this can result in a lack of transparency in your cloud environments, which means that these savings may not even be realised. The risk of increased complexity also increases significantly if multicloud adoption is done on an ad hoc basis rather than being planned from the ground up.

Implementing and managing a multicloud environment can be challenging, especially if you don't have an IT team that is well versed in the various cloud platforms. Each platform has its own interfaces, and configuring and managing different platforms can cause some headaches.

In the survey ‘Public Cloud Trends 2019 and Beyond,’ the option ‘Manage multiple cloud solutions’ ranked fifth among the areas where respondents said they needed more support from their cloud providers. Respondents also stated that they prefer cloud providers who offer help with developing customised cloud strategies and assistance with migration and management functions.

Companies want and should use the most suitable environment for their specific functions, tools and data. Companies that use a multicloud strategy can optimise performance, make significant cost savings and gain significant competitive advantages in a way that is not possible with a single provider. So even though it adds complexity and sometimes requires more expertise and work, it is difficult to argue against adopting a multicloud strategy.