Today, multi-cloud strategies are gaining popularity among enterprises. A survey report by IBM shows that by 2022, 98% of enterprises plan to use multiple hybrid clouds.
When it comes to data warehousing, two (or more) cloud platforms are better than one. Multicloud means a mix of public and private cloud infrastructure, requiring the use of different cloud computing data warehouses (CDW) providers such as Amazon Redshift and Snowflake. This might mean hosting operational data stored in the AWS cloud platform, but transporting and performing analytics on that data in Microsoft Azure.
The underlying cloud platform may be different, such as two different Snowflake instances, one running on Google Cloud Platform and the other running on Azure Cloud Platform. These different cloud computing data warehouses (CDWs) can even be hosted in different regions.
It may still be early days for a multi-cloud strategy, especially for enterprises with the issue of moving on-premises workloads to the cloud. Businesses are likely to face increasing resistance to a single cloud provider offering services. As more and more enterprises require multiple cloud platforms to work better together, it is expected that the field will further develop in the future.
Enterprises are adopting multi-cloud for a number of reasons, including cost savings, different underlying technologies in different departments, more data lakes using cloud data warehouse technology, and preferred cloud computing partners.
The following are common use cases that lead enterprises to design and implement a multi-cloud infrastructure:
Technology integration
With the development of new cloud computing data warehouses on different platforms, enterprises have more choices. Preferred platforms introduce additional warehouse preferences, businesses may create new environments and then use them with existing cloud computing data warehouses (CDWs), or use multi-cloud for a period of time to facilitate moving from one cloud computing environment to another smooth transition.
Data and Disaster Recovery
Many enterprises are utilizing multiple cloud platforms, data lakes and cloud data warehouses to back up their data for data protection purposes. Using a separate system with a copy of your data is a great way to prevent cloud outages, disasters, or any other unplanned downtime.
Regional requirements
Cloud computing providers offer a number of regional data centers that can be leveraged to meet regional compliance and sovereignty requirements for business data. There are also benefits to choosing a cloud provider based on regional strengths and the ability to minimize latency.
Teams and data needs vary
Some businesses will choose to invest in different platforms because the teams have different affinities for the underlying technology. This allows users to take advantage of services that are only available on specific platforms. For example, use Sagemaker in the AWS cloud platform, Snowflake on the Azure cloud platform, or Google ML with Snowflake on the Google cloud platform. Efficiency can be increased by providing each department with the technology they are familiar with, experienced and able to meet their needs.
Diversify and avoid vendor lock-in
Businesses may want to avoid vendor lock-in. For example, as platforms diversify, businesses have more flexibility when pricing, storage or computing offerings change.
Due to the broad, high-value potential benefits of a multi-cloud environment, it has become indispensable for businesses to survive and succeed in today’s digital age. Just as a symphony requires the harmony of its players and instruments, so does a business need to have a coherent multi-cloud environment.
Achieving this requires the right mix of public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and proprietary IT infrastructure. Preparing for a multi-cloud future and finding ways to orchestrate, optimize and drive innovation in this environment is one of the key challenges facing IT and business leaders. Here are five steps users can take to simplify and manage their multi-cloud ecosystem.
Assess your current multi-cloud environment
Managing a multi-cloud environment starts with understanding what environments users currently have. Challenges arise when enterprises proactively adopt infrastructure and solutions from different cloud providers. Each new cloud service comes with its own tools, adding to the complexity. Multi-cloud environments require new management solutions to optimize performance, control costs, and secure complex hybrid applications and environments, whether in the data center or in the cloud.
Adopt open source to avoid vendor lock-in
IBM has said that the focus of its clients is to avoid vendor lock-in. Open-source solutions like OpenShift make it easier for businesses to develop and deploy applications that work in any cloud environment.
With OpenShift, users can now create applications once and run them on any cloud without vendor lock-in. In many cases, businesses struggle to find solutions that provide seamless communication and true interoperability across platforms. E.g:
How to port workloads between cloud platforms from different providers?
How does business resiliency look in a multi-cloud environment?
How do we manage data synchronization, propagation, and security issues across clouds?
What are the paths to modernization for applications in a multi-cloud environment?
Integration is imperative
As more businesses use IT services from multiple service providers, they may face challenges such as rising costs, lack of reliability, slow deployment, and visibility issues.
IT departments need common, unified standards to integrate and manage vendor ecosystems to help address these issues. A complete and unified multi-source ecosystem needs to integrate six key areas, including business, organization, information, governance, process and tools.
Networking is another important integrated part of a multi-cloud environment, and it also needs to be designed to support enterprises running applications in a hybrid computing environment. Some tasks run locally, while others are moved to the cloud. Network control, security and visibility need to be extended to public cloud and multi-cloud environments so that these environments appear to be a single network with a single platform for management functions.
Intelligently manage multi-cloud environments
Developing and managing a multi-cloud environment is a challenge for any organization, whether they are intentionally building a multi-cloud infrastructure or are working to optimize their strategy for a cloud-based architecture. The IBM Institute for Business Value study found that 41 percent of organizations have a multi-cloud management strategy in place, and 38 percent have the tools and procedures to take advantage of multi-cloud.
Therefore, strategically managing a multi-cloud environment is critical. Many businesses have started using multiple cloud services (often from multiple vendors) while continuing to use on-premises IT environments. This model represents a trend in the next generation of IT environments.
The shift to a hybrid cloud operating model, which combines various public clouds, private clouds, and traditional IT, presents new challenges for enterprises. How can organizations manage and optimize this transition? The key lies in leveraging a new set of processes designed for dynamic self-service to fully extend traditional IT operating models.
The current demand from users is that the service portal needs to be expanded, such as adding a cloud service store, so that users can easily discover, order and manage digital services, and pay for the content used. This new operating model must also enable DevOps, enabling multiple users and multiple cloud providers to interact seamlessly.
Walk side by side with partners
Moving to a hybrid cloud operating model can help IT teams more effectively support business initiatives and reduce the likelihood of business units deploying cloud services on their own.
But adopting this new operating model required an immediate and drastic overhaul of the IT team. It can be relatively difficult for the IT team to accomplish this task alone without outside help.
No matter where IT organizations are in their business model transformation, IBM can help by enabling them to deliver automated self-service to business teams to better help organizations take full advantage of cloud computing technology and implement a flexible multi-source approach , unified and comprehensively integrated its existing IT environment with the services provided by multiple cloud providers.
