A multicloud environment is one where an enterprise uses more than one cloud platform (with at least two or more public clouds) that each delivers a specific application or service. A multicloud can be comprised of public, private, and edge clouds to achieve the enterprise’s end goals. In other words, it combines on-premise operations with services and applications running on multiple public cloud providers, which enables organizations to capture the benefits of each platform while mitigating their downsides.
What are the benefits of multicloud?
There are many reasons for organizations to choose a multicloud environment. Each benefit associated with a multicloud approach can prove instrumental in establishing or maintaining a competitive advantage in today’s digital economy. A solid management tool helps in easy migrations, and provides the visibility needed to ensure seamless inventory, security, migration, and change management. Other top drivers include:
Mitigating Vendor Lock-in
By carefully evaluating the expectations and potential pitfalls, and having a strong negotiating position which makes it easy to switch from one cloud provider to another, companies can harness the power of the cloud and get the most value out of their partnership with any cloud service provider.
Suitability
When incorporating multiple clouds into a company's IT strategy, administrators are able to line up their business requirements with the best cloud-hosting providers for each individual task.
Competitive Pricing
Organizations can now enjoy the freedom of comparing different providers and securing the best available rates based on their specific IT needs.
Flexibility and Scalability
Multicloud allows businesses to scale their storage up or down based on an ongoing demand. Ideally, multicloud providers work seamlessly together so organizations can invest in any level of capacity, security and protection based on the needs of each data segment.
As IT organizations embrace multicloud environments, the challenges in realizing their goals are becoming more clear:
Different workflow and management tools
These tools can be expensive and create silos, adding additional complexity to already complex infrastructure.
Lack of unified security
The security of your network must be assessed on a regular basis as your infrastructure and software change over time. Without a unified mechanism to assess your cloud security, you may not catch security risks in time.
Skill gaps
When enterprises deploy a new multiplatform tool, IT leads often have to retrain staff to learn skills across multiple clouds. As organizations rapidly respond to new changes, it’s hard for enterprises to find staff with the multicloud skills they need.
Data Sharing
Multicloud can often cause difficulty in synchronizing and sharing data, have different provider maturity, and have issues with API differences.
To counteract these challenges, organizations should look for solutions that securely connect users, apps, and data anywhere on any device, provision virtual desktops in minutes and prevent vendor lock-in when designing a multicloud environment.
- To prevent data loss or downtime due to a localized component failure in the cloud
- To avoid vendor lock-in
- To achieve broader business and technical goals which include the use of more price-competitive cloud services or taking advantage of the speed, capacity or features offered by a particular cloud provider in a particular geography
- To achieve optimal performance and minimal latency through data sovereignty which enables organizations to locate compute resources as close as possible to end users
- To help organizations meet regulatory requirements by selecting from multiple IaaS providers' datacenter regions or availability zones
The security posture of major cloud providers is as good as or better than most enterprise datacenters and security should no longer be considered a primary inhibitor to the adoption of multicloud services. However, it is not as simple as moving on-premise workloads to the cloud. Security teams should look to leverage the programmatic infrastructure of public cloud IaaS and understand that in a public cloud world, security is a “shared responsibility”. The cloud provider is responsible for security “of the cloud” while the user is responsible for security “in the cloud”. Automating as much of the process as possible removes the potential for human error — generally responsible for successful security attacks. The critical driver for success in the cloud world where digital assets are ephemeral can also get provisioned and deprovisioned on demand. Keeping track of security controls needs to be programmatic for ensuring complete cloud compliance.
While multicloud and hybrid clouds have been used interchangeably, they are indeed unique in their own right.
A hybrid cloud is a subset of the multicloud. We already know that a multicloud is a variety of cloud platforms that each delivers a specific application or service. A hybrid cloud combines on-premises IT (traditional infrastructure and private cloud) with off-premises Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or other services delivered by a public cloud—such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Microsoft Azure—or at a cloud service provider (CSP).
According to this blog, Hybrid Cloud vs Multicloud: What’s the Difference?, “One common misconception when comparing hybrid and multicloud infrastructures is that the two are mutually exclusive. The explicit definition of a multicloud environment suggests that a hybrid cloud model is also a multicloud model. However, the inverse is not always true. A multicloud configuration can be hybridized but it can also exist without the need for individual clouds to talk to each other.” The main thing to keep in mind is that in a multicloud deployment you typically will have two or more public clouds, which is not the case in a hybrid cloud deployment.
Multicloud cloud environments include the presence and usage of many clouds with or without interoperability between them. Utilization of this emerging architecture is growing as it provides access to several service models. “According to Gartner, 70% of enterprises will be implementing a multicloud strategy by the end of 2019,” the blog states.
On the other hand, hybrid cloud allows operators to perform a single task leveraging two separate cloud resources. However, keep in mind that most hybrid cloud environments utilize one private cloud and one public cloud whereas multicloud environments utilize at least two or more public clouds. If you were to visualize a Venn diagram, and assigned a public cloud on the left and a private cloud on the right, a hybrid cloud would entail the sum of both parts. The overlapping space in the middle represents the hybrid layer.
InLoco Media
Xi Beam’s cloud cost optimization module empowered Loco Media’s CTO to better understand the company’s current and previous Amazon Web Services (AWS) spend. The insights provided by Beam helped In Loco Media substantially reduce costs and increase the performance of their AWS environment.
UCSD
To ensure that users could continue to enjoy the freedom to adopt the cloud solutions they needed in a standardized, compliant way, the IT staff began bringing cloud accounts under the umbrella of an AWS enterprise agreement.
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