The use of multi-cloud is now quite regular and more prevalent in the organisations where critical workloads are uploaded in the cloud. It is not just “more than one” CSP (Cloud Service Provider) consideration but overall cloud strategy that has to be designed carefully.
The use of multi-cloud is now quite regular and more prevalent in the organisations where critical workloads are uploaded in the cloud. It is not just “more than one” CSP (Cloud Service Provider) consideration but overall cloud strategy that has to be designed carefully.
Among the 260 enterprises EMA surveyed recently, the majority of respondents – 61% – reported using two or more public cloud providers
Why you need to work with multiple CSPs
- Biggest failover strategy: Using the multi-cloud approach is an excellent way to eliminate single points of failure in your most business-critical processes
- Best of multiple clouds: Leveraging popular and cheaper services from multiple cloud
- Vendor locking: Enterprise still believing in avoiding vendor locking by using multi-cloud strategy
- Security and Compliances: To choosing one CSP over another for the reason of application specific requirement. Ex: Hosting application in own country with specific compliances
The data redundancy and vendor locking concerns are still major driving factors for multi-cloud environment implementation in the enterprises. A multi-cloud strategy also offers the ability to provide assessment to gauge best services from different CSPs. A certain cloud platform offers some services which are unique and with ease of implementation to comparing with other CSPs – another reason for selecting multi-cloud strategy.
However, there are some potential drawbacks to multi-cloud adoption. Organisation needs to keep additional and specialized IT staff to take care of multi-cloud deployments. This may turn into added cost to the company and management of such people can also be a challenge. On the same time, architecting and managing multiple platforms can be highly complex.
In additionally, some cloud providers offer volume discounts if you purchase most from them. Considering multi-cloud scenario, the services are segregated between different CSPs making organisation ineligible for volume criteria.
The multi-cloud strategy can be built using mix of the major public cloud providers, such as AWS – Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and IBM.
Zensar point of view
Zensar being a leading digital solutions and technology services company, working along-with multiple cloud companies to provide services to its customer. Some of the use cases, we recommending multi-cloud strategy where the application/data should be highly available and when customer is asking for cloud assessment for its varied applications. It is always good to have multiple options available in such scenarios as we can reduce the dependency with specific cloud platform. We are at Zensar technologies working on solution called as “Cloud Abstract API”. This particular framework is working towards accessing selected cloud services from multiple cloud providers using APIs. This framework forms an abstract layer between custom application and cloud services wherein you can consume cloud services of any cloud platform using API. The advantage here is you need not to care about underlying cloud services and cloud platforms but to remember API name and mention it in custom application while writing the code.
Multi-cloud strategy is going to stay here along with your cloud computing. It is just a matter when you are ready to take advantage of it and under which of your requirement.