With Hybrid and Agile integration approaches, it is important for decision makers to understand the advantages and disadvantages of adopting a multi-cloud strategy. Multi-Cloud is an approach utilizing one or more public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google, IBM Cloud) to achieve common business objectives.
Advantages of Multi-Cloud
Creative
Developers will get an opportunity to work on multi-cloud offerings to implement workloads in various creative approaches that can optimize enterprise cost. Developers will have an option of choosing appropriate services from different cloud providers for effective business solutions.
Vendor Lock in
Cloud providers often change their services cost due to competition from other cloud providers. Enterprises will lose negotiating power if they choose single vendor for their cloud needs. Opting for a multi-cloud approach enables enterprises to move their workloads between multiple clouds and take advantage of low-cost services.
Reduce Latency
Every cloud provider has its own deployment zones, regions, and data centers across the globe. Choosing a multi-cloud approach enables enterprises to deploy their workloads to the nearest data center to reduce latency challenges. Locking with a single vendor restricts the enterprises to deploy only in available specific regions and data centers.
Disadvantages of Multi-Cloud
Security
Every cloud provider has its own security enforcement mechanisms. It is particularly important to consider on how to configure, manage, alert, log and respond to security events across multiple clouds such as encryption, decryptions/TLS, Certificate management and more.
Multi-Cloud Skills
It is difficult to identify talented cloud engineers and architects with expertise of a single cloud provider. Finding developers, engineers and security experts who have knowledge of multiple clouds is extremely difficult.
Cost Estimation
Though multi-cloud strategy reduces the overall cost, the cost consolidation, effective cost estimation, and cross account reporting helps to manage the financial aspects across multiple clouds.
Hybrid Cloud Management-Tools
- Scalr
- Morpheus Data
- Flexera
- Embotics
Summary
As many organizations are moving to multi-cloud strategies, it is important that decision makers should consider both the advantages and challenges in order to fully take advantage of multi-cloud strategy. Training and knowledge of various cloud services such as compute, memory, and storage requirements should be essential in order to map business requirements for optimized performance. The decision to move to a multi-cloud environment is dependent upon a company’s business objectives and maturity to make it work. By undertaking this preparation work, enterprises will be able to mitigate many of the drawbacks that a multi-cloud approach can bring in.
