Cloud computing is the convenient model of computing where users can access from anywhere a shared pool of resources and pay only for what they consume.
It has been largely adopted by majority of the startups , SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises), and large enterprise businesses. Among the reasons being that it makes the businesses to focus on the core of their business as the cloud provider offers a scalable, reliable and on demand infrastructure, platform or software service.
Multi cloud strategy is the newly adopted trend where businesses are involving more than one cloud vendor to support their business. This should not be confused with hybrid computing.
Hybrid computing refers to when a business runs some of it’s workloads on premise and other on a public or private cloud with a secured connection between the two. Multi cloud on the other hand refers to when a business involves different cloud providers to run it’s workloads.
Some of the benefits of a Multi Cloud Strategy include:
- Avoiding Vendor lock in – Some enterprises are afraid of being locked into a single vendor- thus with the multi cloud strategy they are not “dependent” on a single cloud provider.
- Redundancy and Performance – Every enterprise wants to have a continual up time and performance to beat their competition. This makes them approach multi cloud strategy to support their strategy.
- Data sovereignty /Compliance – Due to different regulations, some enterprises are forced to adopt certain cloud vendors within their regions or within the stipulated regulations regarding data .
However, a multi cloud strategy comes at cost such as you require a large talent pool to handle the various technologies from the various vendors, this can also lead to management complexity.
Some cloud vendors have already adopted the multi cloud model.
Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure cloud have a interoperability partnership allowing customers to run mission critical enterprise workloads across both clouds.
Google embraces the mult cloud strategy with Anthos, an open application modernization platform.
As an enterprise, you need to evaluate your current status on the digital transformation journey, where you are today and where you target to be, then choose wisely a cloud strategy that shall offer you a high ROI.
Laban.
Today, the greatest concern on many enterprise IT infrastructures is manageability, reliability , availability, performance, security, scalability just to list a few.
If a multi cloud strategy solves the above challenges for you, then it’s time you take the leap.
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