Alongside the most well-known hyperscale cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), for many years the trend has been towards multi-clouds, i.e. the simultaneous use of various cloud offerings from different cloud providers.
How does this impact your business? Well, it probably also uses cloud-based platforms for financing, supply chains, HR or even sales and marketing, meaning there are a wealth of good reasons why your company should implement a multi-cloud strategy:
- 1. Having the right data and functionalities to hand at the right time is possible with a best-of-breed approach whereby the best market solution for each task is selected. With a multi-cloud strategy, this becomes child’s play.
- 2. Business continuity and associated recovery processes are crucial aspects of a multi-cloud strategy. Dependence on a single cloud service provider is kept to a minimum as workloads can be distributed across several clouds. The decisive factor here is aligning service levels.
- 3. Scaling and IT resource needs. In most cases, IT departments are susceptible to individual needs such as those of the marketing department, and more often than not respond to issues. With the right multi-cloud strategy, functions and storage resources can be quickly and affordably scaled up and down as required, always bearing corporate compliance in mind.
- 4. Thanks to the price war between SaaS and cloud service providers in general, a multi-cloud strategy can reduce the costs for software operations or even storage capacities depending on workload. In much the same way as on the stock markets, end customers benefit from the ever-changing market situation.
- 5. The lock-in issue can be addressed by leveraging services from several cloud providers. With the right multi-cloud strategy, you can reduce your dependence on a single service provider. Competition between SaaS providers means that utilising new services is easier than ever.
Sounds good, right? However, it all needs to be well implemented to be able to work more productively and flexibly, usually at a lower cost.
To maintain an overview and ensure optimum integration into an existing IT environment, it is essential to do your homework before and over the course of the services’ lifecycle, and this includes pursuing a multi-cloud strategy.
The following questions will help identify and tackle any pain points:
1. Which applications and workloads have to communicate with each other? In other words, which interfaces need to align?
2. In the future, data will probably be stored in new silos. How will these be managed in accordance with applicable compliance polices and how will end users access the applications?
3. Multiple contracts, Service Level Agreements and billing rates make it difficult to maintain an overview. How are price or contractual changes proactively tracked?
You can see that multi-cloud approaches come with challenges that cannot be ignored, but the solution is to set up a suitable multi-cloud strategy.
We are happy to advise you on the benefits of multi-cloud solutions and offer end-to-end services for configuration and operations.
