Businesses used to be hesitant to adopt cloud. Now, not only is having a cloud important, having multiple clouds is essential.
Multiple Reasons for Having Multiple Clouds
There are several reasons businesses decide to use multiple clouds:
Outages happen.
Despite the high overall reliability of the cloud, outages still occur. By using more than one cloud provider, businesses don’t have to experience downtime when a cloud provider has an incident.
Reduce vendor dependence.
Getting all your IT services from a single source creates immense dependency on that provider. That makes businesses vulnerable to rate increases and restricts their technology choices to those the cloud provider supports. Multiple clouds reduce the dependency and offer greater flexibility.
Optimizing spending and technology choices.
By using multiple cloud providers, businesses can choose the best fit for each workload and project, rather than forcing all of their IT onto a single platform.
Choices that Make Multicloud Work
Deploying a successful multicloud architecture requires more than simply signing contracts with multiple cloud providers. There are decisions to be made regarding how to use the multiple clouds and how to configure them. Depending on business needs, these decisions include:
Remaining cloud-neutral or going cloud native.
Multicloud doesn’t necessarily mean deploying the same workload on multiple clouds, but in many cases it does. In order to make the deployment across environments easier, workloads and packages need to ignore cloud-native features tied to a specific cloud vendor. If the business goal for multicloud is to optimize the technology solution for each workload, this may mean picking different resources on every cloud, including taking advantage of cloud native features.
Relying on vendor monitoring tools or building a consolidated view.
Using multiple clouds means you need to implement your own solution to achieve effective monitoring. Each cloud provider has tools, but they only provide insight into their environment. Businesses need a separate tool, such as VAST View, to get a comprehensive picture across all their clouds.
Implementing consistent security and governance.
Security and governance can quickly become inconsistent when there are multiple clouds. Relying on cloud provider solutions means different approaches in every cloud. Alternatively, businesses can choose a third-party product that is supported on each of their cloud platforms in order to have a single solution.
In general, succeeding with multicloud requires maintaining constant awareness of the differences between the cloud platforms and deciding where those differences should be exploited and where they should be avoided. Because VAST IT Services supports all the major cloud platforms, our team has the experience and insight to guide businesses in making smart choices. Contact VAST IT Services to learn more about how our multicloud support can help your business effectively use your multicloud environment.
