As businesses continue to grow and adapt in the digital age, the need to optimise their cloud environment becomes more apparent. A multi-cloud strategy can offer various benefits, including reliability, flexibility and access to the best services. In this blog, we discuss the benefits of the multi-cloud model, the challenges organisations will face and the best practices to successfully manage a multi-cloud environment and create synergies.
Why choose a multi-cloud strategy?
In the past, multi-cloud deployments often developed organically. These days, companies opt more and more for the use of multiple cloud providers from the start. There are various reasons for a multi-cloud strategy:
- Reliability, business continuity and disaster recovery
- Utilising multiple clouds ensures that your entire back end won’t fail due to one cloud provider’s outage. It provides flexibility for shifting resources from one provider to the next, increasing resilience in times of network disruption. If one cloud provider has an outage, you can immediately deploy your services to another one. It’s also always recommended to run your monitoring services on another cloud platform than the rest of your services.
- Access to the best services
- There’s not one best cloud provider, as every vendor has its own specialisations. A multi-cloud strategy enables you to choose the best services from different vendors to optimise performance and cater to your unique business needs. Are you interested in the newest machine-learning-as-a-service offerings from Google? Add them to your cloud strategy. Are you enticed by the cheap pricing for compute resources from Amazon’s spot auctions? Move some of your compute demand there while the price is cheap. This approach also saves you when a cloud provider retires one of its services. For example, when Google decided that the IoT didn’t fit into their strategy going forward and they needed to specialise in other domains, they retired Google Cloud IoT Core. Users with a multi-cloud approach were then able to migrate to Azure IoT Hub or AWS IoT Core.
- Sovereignty
- Not all data are equally sensitive and not all workloads are evenly regulated. Hosting everything with a cloud provider that complies to your most stringent requirements is expensive. With a multi-cloud environment, you can run your sensitive and regulated workloads on a secure, compliant national cloud that meets national data residency and data sovereignty requirements. Less sensitive data can be stored on another, more cost-effective public cloud platform that’s optimised for the purpose. This way you choose how much control you need over your workloads and data. And not all applications must be in the cloud. The most sensitive ones can still be on premises, so a hybrid cloud can be a good approach too.
- Avoiding vendor lock-in
- Operating in a multi-cloud environment reduces dependence on a single cloud provider. It enables flexibility to switch to other providers if the cost of specific services increases. This is an important reason why many companies these days opt for a multi-cloud approach from the start.
Challenges and solutions for managing a multi-cloud environment
Implementing a multi-cloud strategy requires managing various facets, such as automation, security, policy governance, compliance, performance monitoring and cost management. All of these come with their own challenges:
- Which tools are you going to use to manage your multi-cloud environment?
- Multi-cloud management vendors continue to expand their functionality in a race to offer the broadest range of tools. They often provide a centralised view of an enterprise’s distributed resources, although each vendor has its strengths and weaknesses. Can you find your way in the complex landscape of multi-cloud management vendors?
- Whichever tools you choose, an excellent option is to use Infrastructure as Code (IaC). With this approach, managing and handling infrastructure is done in the same way as you treat an application’s source code. This can then be made an integral part of every Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) workflow. For example, when new code for an application is committed to a repository, a job is triggered to deploy all the needed infrastructure. Once the infrastructure is no longer needed, the cleanup process will leave nothing behind. For multi-cloud environments, it’s important to choose IaC tools with abstraction layers such as Terraform or Kubernetes. This allows you to do cloud-agnostic service deployments.
- How do you develop across multiple clouds?
- Developing applications in a multi-cloud environment requires developers to possess knowledge and proficiency in the specific tools and technologies used by each individual cloud provider. This puts pressure on developers to learn, adapt, and maintain a diverse skill set.
- With an Internal Development Platform (IDP), your organisation is able to offer an abstraction layer between developers and cloud platforms. This means developers can work with a single set of tools and APIs, standardising the development experience regardless of the underlying cloud infrastructure. This way, a developer that works in Node.js with a MySQL database doesn’t have to consider whether it’s deployed on Azure or AWS.
- Do you have a service catalog?
- In a multi-cloud environment, you have access to multiple possible services for the same functionality. For example, as a user of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, you have access to Azure IoT Hub and AWS IoT Core. Each of these has specific costs, SLAs and other relevant parameters.
- How do you find the right service and how do you know which ones are complying to your policies? Do you have one main cloud that you use by default for your services and another specialised cloud for specific services? Or, do you consider each of your cloud providers as equal platforms to choose from?
- A service catalog is important to be able to tackle these challenges and gives a unified view over all available cloud services. It’s a comprehensive and organised collection of IT services you want to offer in your organisation, serving as a central repository of information about the available services. This standardised catalog simplifies the evaluation, selection and consumption of cloud services in a multi-cloud environment.
- Are you able to extract the business value from multiple clouds?
- Every major cloud provider has its own terminology, its own pricing packages and its own way of billing. It’s not that easy to integrate all of these costs in one view, to have a good idea of what business value your multi-cloud environment is bringing and to predict your cloud costs.
- A good solution for this challenge is FinOps, a public cloud management discipline that enables organisations to get maximum business value from the cloud by helping technology, finance and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions. Adopting FinOps to manage your multi-cloud environment improves cost visibility, cost accountability, cost optimisation and cost savings, all contributing to more predictable cloud costs.
- Is your organisation ready for a multi-cloud environment?
- Do your IT staff have the technical expertise and resources to effectively manage multiple cloud platforms? Are your organisation’s security and compliance requirements compatible with using multiple cloud platforms? Do your budget and billing structures support multi-cloud environments? These are all critical factors for the cloud-readiness of your organisation.
- A best practice to prepare your organisation for the cloud is to have a centralised Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE). This is a dedicated operational team that helps IT and business teams and cloud service users and answers questions. The CCoE’s work is fundamental in enabling the advantages of a multi-cloud strategy and drive cloud-enabled IT transformation.
Distributed cloud and edge computing
Taking the idea of a multi-cloud environment to its extreme is the distributed cloud. This is an extension of the traditional cloud computing model where cloud services are offered through a geographically distributed network of interconnected data centres. These data centres can be part of multiple cloud providers, other third parties, co-location centers with your organisation’s hardware or on-premise at your organisation’s locations.
One specific type of distributed cloud is edge computing, the practice of deploying computer processing, storage and networking resources closer to the sources of data generation and the end users. Instead of relying solely on centralised data centres or cloud platforms, edge computing distributes processing across devices or localised edge data centres. This approach helps reduce latency, optimises bandwidth usage, supports real-time processing and enhances security and privacy.
Because of their bigger scale, a distributed cloud and edge computing make all the challenges of a multi-cloud environment even more complex. For example, managing 50 edge locations manually isn’t feasible anymore. This makes automation and Infrastructure as Code even more important. Another complexity is implementing a secure network between all those edge locations. A Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is a possible solution.
Embrace the power of multi-cloud with a trusted partner
Multi-cloud environments offer numerous benefits for businesses, but a successful implementation that creates synergies between the different cloud services requires expertise and strategic planning. Devoteam is a leading consulting firm experienced in security, application development and all major cloud providers. We can help you navigate the complexities of multi-cloud management, enabling your organisation to harness the full potential of this powerful strategy.
Contact us to learn more about how to get started.