Unlocking the Power of Multi-cloud: Advantages, Use Cases, and Challenges
What Exactly is MultiCloud?
MultiCloud Platform is a concept that involves utilizing a variety of cloud resources, including public clouds, private clouds, and edge computing, to build, operate, and secure applications consistently across different platforms. Enterprises adopt multi-cloud strategies to deploy applications on the cloud that best suit their needs, modernize their applications, ensure enterprise sovereignty, and secure their workforce. Multi-cloud infrastructure provides the flexibility to run workloads on any cloud and manage and secure applications consistently across different clouds. With a successful multi-cloud approach, businesses can increase their agility, reduce costs, and minimize risks across their IT landscape.
Use Cases of MultiCloud
To accelerate their digital transformation journey, enterprises are leveraging a B2B multicloud platform with multiple cloud platforms and services for various reasons:
- To accelerate app transformation and the delivery of new apps: Instead of a cloud-first approach, businesses are opting for a smarter strategy, deploying apps on public, private, and edge clouds that align with their business needs and goals.
- To avoid vendor lock-in and ensure data sovereignty: Organizations are spreading their cloud estate across multiple environments to manage cloud spend, vendor dependencies, and lock-ins while avoiding vendor lock-in and ensuring data sovereignty.
- To distribute applications and services to the edge: Businesses in logistics, retail, and manufacturing are distributing applications and services to the edge to achieve greater automation, efficiency, and improved customer experiences.
To support the rise of the distributed workforce : Securing and managing user devices, and enabling remote productivity is becoming a priority for enterprises in managing their distributed workforce.
Advantages of MultiCloud Services
Organizations can gain many multicloud benefits from leveraging these services to abstract core services offered by cloud providers. These benefits include:
- Flexibility and Option: Enterprises that adopt a multi-cloud strategy can benefit from increased agility and flexibility to remain competitive in their markets. By leveraging cloud-specific services, businesses can methodically modernize their application portfolio and migrate workloads to overcome challenges posed by legacy infrastructure and limited in-house capacity. This enables them to better support their entire application portfolio and pick the best-suited cloud-specific services for each application.
- Make use of best-of-breed services: Enterprises can leverage a multi-cloud strategy to select the best cloud platform that offers the most optimal technology solution at a competitive price. Organizations can evaluate the physical location, database, pricing, service level agreement, and performance characteristics of each provider to create a comprehensive cloud solution tailored to meet their specific business needs.
- Innovation and Modernization: By utilizing modern orchestration tools, organizations can automate the management of a multi-cloud strategy, which includes managing cloud and on-premises workloads. This automation can allow IT resources to be utilized for code modernization and innovation, allowing the organization to take advantage of the latest services, products, and platforms that are continuously being introduced.
- Enhanced Security: When adopting multi-cloud strategies, organizations often embrace a zero-trust approach to cloud security that can guarantee the security of every transaction and interaction taking place in the cloud. While every major cloud provider provides advanced physical security, logical security is still the organization’s responsibility when using cloud providers for their IaaS platforms.
- Negotiating Price: Organizations can gain an advantage in pricing by using multiple cloud providers. The competitive market pressure on providers to deliver Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to savvy customers increases the bargaining power of organizations. This allows them to compare different providers and secure the best possible pricing and payment terms for each contract.
Reduction of Risk: By adopting a multi-cloud approach, organizations can mitigate the risk of infrastructure failures or cyber attacks. They can quickly switch workloads from one cloud provider to another and then return them when the issue has been resolved.
How is Digital Transformation Enabled by a MultiCloud Strategy?
Digital transformation can be achieved through a multicloud strategy that revolutionizes how applications are designed, developed, and delivered across various cloud platforms. A multi-cloud digital transformation strategy allows organizations to deploy applications on the most suitable public, private, and edge clouds that align with their business goals and application requirements. By adopting a distributed and heterogeneous IT infrastructure across cloud, data center, and edge, companies can achieve the next level of their digital business transformation. A successful multicloud strategy can help customers speed up their time to market, cut down expenses, and drive innovation.
Challenges of MultiCloud Strategy
The adoption of multi-cloud services presents a challenge for IT organizations in supporting various application architectures and workloads across different cloud platforms. Each provider offers unique capabilities that are not shared with other platforms, resulting in inconsistencies in infrastructure and operating models. This adds complexity and risk to the environment, causing pain points for both IT personnel and developers in successfully operationalizing multi-cloud, especially in the context of cloud application development:
Some of the multi cloud challenges are-
- Unreliable Infrastructure: The lack of a consistent multi-cloud infrastructure across all environments forces cloud operational teams to work in isolated units, with limited flexibility to adapt to changing business requirements.
- A Constantly Evolving Application Landscape: To keep up with the pace of digital business, organizations must accommodate the increasing intricacies of application architectures, both old and new, while maintaining performance and availability across multiple cloud environments, and supporting DevSecOps.
- Inadequate Management: The absence of a streamlined and uniform infrastructure and management tools for multi-cloud in different cloud environments can lead to higher expenses and create significant security vulnerabilities.
- Security and Networking: The process of securing and networking applications and data across multiple cloud platforms is complicated, leading to potential security vulnerabilities, higher risks, and a larger surface area for potential attacks.
A Widely Dispersed Workforce: As enterprises expand their reach to include more external data and users, they find it challenging to balance the need for choice, flexibility, and a user-friendly experience while maintaining a high level of security.
Why Choose A5E
A5E Consulting provides a comprehensive range of services and technologies that are designed to seamlessly integrate with multi-cloud environments, allowing organizations to optimize their business operations across various functions. Our offerings are specifically tailored to help customers achieve their strategic goals and enhance their digital transformation efforts.
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