A multi-cloud environment is a familiar terminology for businesses around the sectors, whether it is small or big. It offers agility, cost efficiency, and flexibility to divide workloads into different environments. According to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise, 76% of organizations use two or more public clouds, with the average holding 2.3 clouds in use.
Cloud adds an extra-dimensional layer to organizations’ digital transformation journey, taking it from embracing technology to a full-fledged rebuilding of procedures, tools, and experiences in a virtual environment accessible from anywhere.
According to the Virtana report, 80% of businesses have a multi-cloud strategy, and 78% of enterprises work with more than 3 public clouds.
What is a multi-cloud environment?
A multi-cloud environment uses more than one cloud platform (public or private cloud) from different vendors. It combines on-premise operations with applications running on multiple public cloud providers, allowing organizations to grab the maximum benefits of each platform.
The multi-cloud environment offers many benefits to the business; an organization can incorporate multiple clouds basis on the requirement and IT strategy with the best service providers for each task. Here below are the few major benefits of adopting the multi-cloud strategy.
Benefits of the multi-cloud platform
Flexibility: With multiple-cloud, businesses will have different cloud vendors and will not be dependent on single vendors platform for services. The organization can prefer the best cloud services from different providers based on the performance, cost, security, and features that best suit the requirement. It minimizes the risk of Vendor Lock-in.
Agility: With multi-cloud, businesses will have different platforms and servers with broader accesses; data can be switched to a closer server to the place of need to minimize the response time and improve performance. It will also enhance agility and execution and reduce downtime.
Uptime: With multi-cloud, Business won’t be fully dependent on a single platform, The other platform’s server can be used as a backup server, which takes control in case of any disaster or downtime. It will mitigate the risk of unplanned downtime and outages.
Enhanced Experience: With multi-cloud, you have different servers, possibly in different locations; you can switch platform basis on features to provide an improved experience to your customers and partners without compromising service quality.
To enhance workload performance, mitigate service downtime, and avoid vendor lock-in, a multi-cloud environment is essential, but managing a multi-cloud environment will be more challenging than managing a single-cloud platform. Here below are the major challenges of the multi-cloud platform.
Challenges of a multi-cloud platform
Complexity in integration: Managing multiple-cloud environments would require additional time, resources and may add extra costs to make it function securely. The complexity may also find while integrating networking, automation, data services, and recoverability. The integration will also require to exchange the of resources from both vendors. The organization may need to adopt a robust data integration solution to function the system properly.
Expensive: There can be additional costs when managing a multi-cloud environment. Both the cloud service provider will charge differently basis on the services. Also, transferring data from one vendor to another will charge extra costs. Moving data from one cloud to another will be more expensive than moving data with a cloud services provider’s servers.
Security challenges: Maintaining the security requirements of both could service providers will take a lot of work. It can be challenging because of the various kind of endpoints that exist in each cloud. Cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated. A multi-cloud environment can broaden the attack vector for a bad actor to compromise. Therefore, organizations need a comprehensive multi-cloud approach that maintains workloads on virtual servers for security.
Professionals to manage the right cloud management tool: There is a shortage of cloud experts who can manage multi-cloud platforms, it is a little bit difficult to have in-house experts capable of executing and handling operations on multiple-cloud environments. In addition, they must understand networking construction in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.
Managing Multi-cloud environment
Many enterprises use the multi-cloud platform but do not efficiently utilize its full benefits. The best way to efficiently manage a multi-cloud environment is to manage applications and resources centrally across the different cloud service providers, manage them as a single cloud. Security of the data and infrastructure should always come first. Therefore, all vendor’s cloud platform security guidelines should be adequately executed and maintained. Organizations usees multi-cloud management tools to deploy and handle multi-cloud platforms.
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