For business agility and the thirst for innovation, enterprises are moving up the cloud stack, away from conventional infrastructure services. Not long ago hybrid cloud garnered the attention as being the go-to strategy by enterprises around the globe. However, in the recent past, ‘multicloud’ approach is what has had every CIO and CTO’s head turning. Multicloud serverless computing is the future of cloud computing and has been confirmed so by a report sponsored by F5 ‘The Future of the Multi-Cloud (FOMC).
Taking the cue and realizing they cannot source all their needs from a single provider, smart and insightful enterprises have already made a move and are working with multiple cloud providers. In fact, 86% of enterprises now use a multicloud strategy — Virtustream and Forrester Consulting, 2018.
Advantages
A multicloud environment provides:
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Flexibility
By employing multiple cloud-hosting companies, particularly a blend of both public and private hosts, businesses can easily segregate their workload into separate environments to match their needs to a solution that fits best.
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Resilience against DDoS attacks
A good multicloud architecture comes in handy in the likelihood of a cloud provider experiencing DDoS attack. One can instantly shift the entire load or the services impacted to a different cloud environment without suffering a complete lockdown.
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An ability to evade vendor lock-in
Imagine what happens when you eventually outgrow the need of a particular cloud or you are unable to accept the restructuring of an agreement or pricing structure by the only cloud vendor you are tied to do business with? Adopting a multicloud strategy gives you the leverage to avoid a vendor lock-in. With the ability to transfer workload between providers, it becomes easier to function effectively and reduce the dependence on a single provider.
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A power of choice
The power of choice offers the ease of exploring various providers so that you can find the perfect fit to each of your business requirements. Rather than bending your business processes to suit a particular provider’s functionality, you can choose from a host of cloud providers based on characteristics such as size requirements and upload speed that seamlessly fits your necessity.
Read more: Advantages of Multi-Cloud Approach
Challenges
As it happens with every strategy, moving to a multicloud environment accounts for certain challenges. A few aspects need to be weighed in while on the road to implementation. Some of these challenges are:
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Multiple vendor assessment & management
Multicloud environment refers to literally multiplying the number of your cloud providers for efficient functioning of the environment in the long run. Careful assessment of various providers to know the level of performance, security, and the kind of well-managed services that they offer can be a time-consuming affair. Needless to say, the more the number of services availed (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS solutions) the greater the burden of vendor management. Technical know-how to link the various platforms together is another daunting task.
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Transition complexity
Another challenge is that of transitioning your IT infrastructure to the chosen multicloud environment. A few issues that you will have to take care of is prevention of application sprawl, easy migration of all the apps across various cloud networks, affirmation of the presence of automated policies across the new network, etc. Instances requiring reconfiguration should be avoided as this might be a loss of the efficiency gain. A thorough app feasibility review, and assessing the infrastructure, app, and business demands before choosing the right multicloud model will ensure a smooth implementation process.
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Compliance & governance issues
With compliance and regulatory standards becoming more and more complex, you need to ensure that all your cloud providers meet every requirement. Apart from this, enterprises need to have a comprehensive governance plan in place for a unified view of their entire cloud services on the multicloud environment. Issues in focus that need to be taken care of are identifying unused resources, process lags, and security threats in real-time as well as ensuring that the right resources are granted access to the right applications.
Nevertheless, carefully considering all of the advantages and disadvantages, enterprises are moving towards a multicloud environment, ensuring that the services run cohesively and risks are reduced to a minimum.
Recent Trends
Let us take a look at the recent trend, which is predicted to stay on for a few years in the market, with the acceptance of this newfound strategy.
- Everything is on multicloud. With no cost penalty for multicloud migration, lot of businesses are adopting this strategy using advanced cloudops platforms. According to the Sumo Logic 2018 State of Modern Applications & DevSecOps in the Cloud report, multicloud strategy adoption and implementation has doubled. Amazon Web Services leads the way with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform fast catching on.
- Serverless computing is going to be a crucial part of most of the cloud Dev services due to its ease of use. With improvement of cloud Dev services and expansion of the serverless subsystems, however, conventional PaaS systems might experience pressure. The report by Sum Logic states that serverless architectures are on the rise with one in every three enterprises making use of AWS Lambda technologies.
- With the growth of containers, the use of Kubernetes experiences growth. Sum Logic reports confirm that 28% percent of enterprises make use of Docker containers in AWS and one in every three enterprises make use of managed or native Kubernetes solutions.
Conclusion
Current research indicates that enterprises are accelerating towards multicloud models to transform their business outcomes. Achieving a balance between the private and public cloud will be a richer set of options to maintain a competitive edge in this fast-paced digital economy. Regardless of what the trends predict, is multicloud the eventual end game? Only time will tell!
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