Pros & Cons Of A Multi-Cloud Strategy For Businesses

Traditional workloads and operations are being modernized, and cloud technology is being increasingly adopted for scalability and performance. Initial environments were unable to cope with increasing workloads and functionalities.

Today, businesses are migrating to multi-cloud operating environments in order to take advantage of best-of-breed technology configured in the most efficient way possible. It allows companies to select their preferred platform for each workload or end-user preference. 

It combines public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions into a single package that does not require the use of multiple environments. It allows businesses to take advantage of vendor lock-in while supporting business objectives such as continuity, disaster recovery, and performance optimization. All of this while increasing organizational agility.

On the other hand, developing an intercloud necessitates integrating two services, each of which runs on its infrastructure. It’s a must when you want to incorporate data and analytics workflows across multiple services/clouds.

Evolving Importance Of Multi-Cloud For Businesses

As part of the dynamic and evolving multi-cloud world – where personalization reigns supreme – businesses must have access to flexible data platforms. This flexibility allows companies to adapt their strategies as needed, based on various infrastructures, applications, and requirements.

While some BI features may appear similar on the surface, access to capabilities can sometimes be limited depending on what an organization and its data team are trying to accomplish. Enterprises can avoid being locked down by a single vendor by using a multi-cloud Business Intelligence approach, which allows them to take advantage of a variety of strengths.

Pros & Cons Of Building A Multi-Cloud Strategy 

Multi-cloud is a dynamic strategy for achieving long-term business objectives by mixing and matching workloads across multiple public cloud vendors (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google), all managed through a single platform.

Larger businesses are increasingly opting for a multi-cloud strategy. Many businesses already use multiple clouds because it provides more flexibility and opportunities for rapid innovation and deployment.

However, with other options, such as developing a hybrid cloud infrastructure, those who make decisions must be well-informed about the benefits and drawbacks of a multi-cloud strategy.

Advantages Of A Multi-Cloud Strategy 

Moving to a multi-cloud strategy has numerous advantages. The following are some of the key benefits of a multi-cloud strategy:

The flexibility to innovate quickly while taking advantage of the unique or best-in-class sets of services that each cloud provider offers is the primary benefit of a multi-cloud strategy. This frees up your developers’ time to focus on innovation rather than compromising to meet the constraints of one cloud provider over another.

All cloud providers have multiple geographic regions and data centers within each region to host your environment. While outages aren’t common, they do happen and can cause major disruptions.

Going multi-cloud allows you to have a separate, independent replica of your application on the infrastructure of another cloud provider, which you can deploy if one vendor goes down.

To reduce latency and improve user experience, you can choose cloud regions and zones close to your customers. The shorter the distance that data must travel, the faster your app will respond.

Although each cloud provider has data centers around the world, one provider may be closer to your customers. Using a combination of cloud providers to achieve faster speeds could be worthwhile if you want to improve the user experience of your applications.

•  Managing Vendor Lock-in

You can reduce your reliance on a single cloud provider by using multiple cloud providers.

It’s risky to rely on a single service provider for everything. A single provider may not be able to provide the required service levels for a specific service. Worse, a cloud provider may go out of business or become a competitor of yours.

Disadvantages Of A Multi-Cloud Strategy 

Building and managing a multi-cloud architecture has its own set of difficulties. The following are some of the most important considerations to make before implementing a multi-cloud strategy

Professionals who work in the cloud are in high demand. It isn’t easy to find cloud engineers and architects with a single cloud provider’s expertise. It’s nearly impossible to find developers, engineers, and security experts familiar with multiple clouds.

You’ll need to find the right people to develop on multiple cloud platforms, secure multiple infrastructures, and manage and operate multiple clouds as an organization.

You can use a single cloud provider’s tools and expertise to manage your app’s data security, access permissions, and compliance requirements when working with a single cloud provider.

When applications are deployed across multiple clouds, they become more complex and have a larger attack surface, increasing the risk of a security breach. Setting up a secure network for a single cloud with IDS/IPS, firewalls, WAF, virus protection, and incident response is complex.

Across multiple clouds, organizations must consider how they will configure, manage, alert, log, and respond to security events.

•  Cost Estimation, Optimization & Reporting

Although using multiple cloud vendors can save money, consolidating costs, chargeback, and cost estimation becomes more difficult.

Each cloud provider charges differently for each service, so you’ll need a good understanding of each cloud’s pricing structure to wade through the math and draught estimates.

You’ll need cross-account cost reporting and optimization tools to efficiently manage the financial aspects of using services across multiple clouds in terms of usage and billing.

When it comes to operational management, multi-cloud adds can be complicated.

Simple administrative tasks, such as how to patch your operating systems, monitor applications, and services, alert and respond to events, consolidate logs, backup data, and access your resources, become more complicated when your infrastructure is spread across multiple clouds.

Regardless of the benefits and drawbacks, technology business leaders must prepare for an inter-cloud and the multi-cloud world to gain a competitive advantage. 

However, there is an argument that if you use a large cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, you can meet all of your needs in one place. Application developers require both IaaS and managed PaaS services for every building block.

For modern app developers, multi-cloud makes sense because they use lightweight specialized tools for the job and actively experiment with smaller service providers.

Conclusion 

As the importance of multi-cloud for the future of Business Intelligence grows, it is time for businesses to figure out what matters to them and then define their data strategy. BI’s growth, and its role in helping businesses transform themselves digitally, cannot be overlooked, regardless of industry or department.