What is Multi-cloud? Benefits, Challenges, Use Cases & More

Blog Summary: This blog is a short but handy guide that aims to help organizations understand the importance of having a multi-cloud strategy. It will help them save time moving workloads across different clouds by choosing the best services at the best prices.

Choosing a cloud strategy for your organization is a complex process. Organizations must understand that each workload must have the best computing environment.

Since many enterprises use cloud services across different geographical locations, it’s a struggle for them to choose just one public cloud provider. According to Fortune Business Insights, the multi-cloud management market is projected to reach USD 50.04 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 28.6%.

Understanding what is multi-cloud allows organizations the flexibility to choose their preferred add-ons specific to their business operations. According to a report by International Data Corporation (IDC), Banking, Software and Information Services, and Telecommunications will be the three largest industries for public cloud services by 2027, spending up to USD 326 trillion:

In this blog, we’ll explore different aspects of a multi-cloud cloud strategy and how they differ from a hybrid cloud strategy. It will help them give a direction to simplify their data migration processes by optimizing their cloud infrastructure.

What is Multi-cloud?

A multi-cloud is a combination of two or more public cloud providers. This approach allows organizations to leverage services from both public and private cloud platforms.

The multi-cloud approach allows organizations to simplify the process of deploying their on-premises legacy cloud infrastructure. With a cloud-native architecture, a multi-cloud distributes workloads between different computing environments.

The most prominent cloud providers included in this approach are Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and IBM. The selection of the services they want to integrate depends on the location, costs, and technical requirements.

This cloud computing approach for enterprises has proven to save costs, plan business continuity, and strengthen disaster recovery.

The Difference Between Multi-cloud and Hybrid Cloud

Multi-cloud uses cloud services from multiple vendors. For example, an organization can use one vendor for data migration and another vendor for hosting solutions. The workloads are distributed, and they may or may not be integrated.

On the other hand, a hybrid cloud uses a combination of cloud development services between on-premises and more than one public cloud environment. Both of them are integrated to provide seamless data transfer across each other as and when required.

Here is a tabular comparison between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud:

Why is Multi-cloud Important?

The importance of multi-cloud cannot be understated, as the security of cloud applications is extremely important, regardless of the situation—whether it’s normal everyday operations or instances where an organization is recovering from a recent disaster.

Let’s take a simple example of an IT company’s everyday operation: a server going down can result in an outage and increase downtime when it shuts down and doesn’t respond to network requests optimally.

This instance can soon turn into a disaster by being vulnerable to the security and compliance requirements that the shutdown may cause. In this case, individual cloud providers offer services to back the precious data stored in on-premises setups.

However, the multi-cloud environment consists of a serverless architecture for seamless data coordination across different cloud providers. It allows users to choose the best services from each provider to adopt.

They can also avoid vendor lock-in and reduce cloud computing bills for their enterprise by paying only for the services they use. At this point, organizations need to ensure that they are ready to store the same data across multiple cloud environments.

Hence, a multi-cloud approach is immensely significant, as it allows them to maintain the optimal performance levels of data access.

What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Multi-cloud Strategy?

Adopting the multi-cloud strategy can help an organization build an architecture for executing different types of workloads, depending on its infrastructure needs.

Here are some of the pros and cons:

Pros

1. Better Integrations

By adopting cloud development services like IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS during their development lifecycle, organizations can prevent siloed data storage. The multi-cloud approach allows the integration of many cloud solutions, such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

2. No Single Point of Failure

Having a multi-cloud approach facilitates real-time cloud data analytics. In return, it ensures smooth data flow across each application, reducing redundancy.

If a server goes down, the operations of other clouds will not be affected. Even when there is unplanned downtime, it reduces the risk of a server failing.

3. Less Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

A multi-cloud approach is a beneficial investment in saving costs on your IT infrastructure. You can minimize the TCO by integrating a public cloud environment that reduces overheads and facilitates scaling up or down according to your needs.

Cons

1. Complex Management

Since multi-cloud offers deploying different cloud models, each with different technologies and processes, it is difficult for organizations to manage and provides less visibility to the tech stack or stored data and processes running in different clouds.

2. More Time Taken for Data Transfer

Having multiple cloud vendors increases the delay when transferring data packets from one cloud to another. Depending on their geographical location, frequency of interactions, and tight integrations, each cloud has to interact with another to complete user requests.

3. Less Security of Environment

Multiple cloud vendors can increase the attack surface due to the integration of many cloud environments. It can result in balancing the load of data transfers between data centers, as the availability of data is a crucial element in security.

When to Use a Multi-cloud Strategy?

The multi-cloud approach provides organizations with freedom and flexibility for moving applications from one location to another. It allows full control over costs, uptime, downtime, and latency, ultimately impacting the customer experience.

However, this approach is not a good fit for every organization. Hence, they should assess the following before using multi-cloud development:

• They are concerned about preventing website outages
• They are looking to develop a protection plan to mitigate risks
• They seek faster website load times for customers
• They need continuous access to improve network performance
• They want vendor-specific features to help save cloud bills by choosing only the most valuable ones

What is Multi-cloud Storage and How Does it Work?

Multi-cloud storage is a combination of different storage services for developing cloud applications provided by more than one cloud vendor. Selecting a public, private, or hybrid approach creates one unique architecture for data distribution management.

Primary services in the form of resources include:

• Database support, block storage, and object
• Supplier-integrated services like resellers, cloud service vendors, and Managed Service Providers (MSPs)
• Marketplace services like virtual machine images and third-party apps

Controllers power an enterprise multi-cloud storage through a storage manager, cluster, and security agents. They are the foundation of multi-cloud storage and ensure that the storage resources of all the services are combined in a unified pool.

These resources can include services like third-party solutions and marketplace images. An organization needs only an Application Programming Interface (API) to manage these resources.

They can ditch the siloed storage infrastructure for data access from different public environments. Multi-cloud provides a single infrastructure accessible from a centralized dashboard and is simply available whenever needed.

What is Shadow IT?

Shadow IT occurs when the need to standardize data access occurs. Some departments often adopt cloud services and technologies outside of those managed under the company’s IT infrastructure.

An organization can run into complications if this finds its way into the cloud application development services without approval. These services can become central to keeping business operations running.

It can compel management to secure them in their IT infrastructure. Multi-cloud can help organizations tackle this issue by providing only sanctioned cloud services that are compliant with security standards.

What are the Use Cases of Multi-cloud?

Multi-cloud solutions are best when having a single-cloud approach is not working for an organization. They can fulfill your business requirements with multi-cloud as it enables them to meet the proximity of global users in different regions.

If they have bigger workloads, they can utilize specific cloud services for better distribution and data security. Here are the top use cases of the multi-cloud strategy:

1. Enhanced App Transformation and Delivery

Choosing app deployment on public, private, and edge cloud enables businesses to achieve their goals of better data access. It offers increased redundancy and resilience by directing the traffic to other cloud providers.

2. No Issue with Vendor Lock-in

Spreading the entire infrastructure across multi-cloud environments ensures data sovereignty, saves total cloud bills, and avoids dependence on one cloud vendor. By ensuring data security and standard compliance, they can distribute their workloads.

3. Enhanced Disaster Recovery and Backups

The multi-cloud approach is beneficial for recovering from uncertain outages and saving millions by increasing the uptime.

They can customize their failover models and respond better to outages. It increases productivity by switching across on-premises, private, and public cloud vendors.

What are the Multi-cloud Services?

Multi-cloud services have consistent APIs to standardize distinct functional areas across clouds. In addition to APIs, they also consist of the object model and identity management as two of their core functions.
They can:

1. Run on a single cloud but can support multiple cloud interactions
2. Run on multiple clouds and support cloud interactions across at least two clouds
3. Run on a cloud vendor chosen by the organization to automate basic operations even when disconnected fully.

The multi-cloud strategy builds its own architecture by storing the functionalities from different providers to reduce the complexity of the data access. It stores public clouds, data centers, and edge locations in vertical formats.

Similarly, the services are stored in horizontal formats. Hence, it serves dual purposes by enhancing the native services of each cloud provider and providing consistency of functions across different clouds.

The data portability across multiple cloud environments enables organizations to manage workloads with a centralized console. Common services include Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Cloud Storage, Data Warehousing, and Disaster Recovery.

The common types of functions provided by multi-cloud services are:

1. Application Enhancing Services

Database management, serverless architecture, continuous integration, and continuous deployment (CI/CD), development toolkit, mobile device management, and end-user application delivery.

2. Infrastructure Automation Services

Self-service Virtual Machines (VMs), Core Computing, Network Services, Container Storage, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Kubernetes Solutions.

3. Security Detection Services

Network Detection and Response (NDR), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), and Next-gen Anti Virus (NGAV).

Multi-cloud management usually offers complete visibility into IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS by streamlining operations, predicting availability, and automating corrective actions.

Conclusion

A multi-cloud architecture works on the idea that the more complex your business is, the more workload migration you would need. However, you don’t have to dive head-on for a multi-cloud approach.

If your organization can manage its on-premises setup with one cloud provider, you can start with a single cloud provider solution. As your business grows and the staff learns to manage data migration processes, you can choose a multi-cloud approach.

Providing the best computing environment for each workload should be your primary goal. With Moon Technolabs, you have the flexibility to choose multiple cloud providers with robust tech stacks and streamline your cloud budget.