Unlocking the True Potential of Multi-cloud

Mar 17, 2023

Digital Transformation | 4 min READ

From “why cloud” to “how cloud” - that has been the most significant shift in organizations’ attitude in the past couple of years. Fueled by industry movements and dynamic customer demands, organizations were forced to abandon the inertia of staying on the “well-trodden-path” and adopt technologies capable of unlocking competitive advantage. This is where the cloud took center stage.

Vikas Singh

Head

Cloud Consulting

Birlasoft

Rishu Sharma

Practice Director

Digital Evangelist and Storyteller, Digital BU

Birlasoft

As businesses continue to mature their cloud footprint, it is imperative for them to re-work on the optimal cloud strategy. Owing to the ever-changing business landscape, customer preferences, compliance and regulation requirements, enterprises seem to favor a cloud strategy that is scalable, agile and resilient. Given the confounding array of choices available from multiple providers, organizations face the dilemma of deciding on the type of deployment that would best suit them. With the growing adoption of Containerization in today’s scenario, businesses have the flexibility to distribute their applications/workloads across several cloud providers in a multi-cloud setup, thus, mitigating risks, driving innovation, optimizing costs, and bolstering agility and resilience

In this scenario, organizations must understand the business value that can be unlocked by adopting a multi-cloud strategy.

Multi-cloud and the Luxury of Choice

The flexibility of a multi-cloud approach allows organizations the freedom to pick, choose and customize solutions to best fit their needs. Enterprises can work towards a ‘best of breed’ model, utilizing the best features different providers offer. For example, some providers offer low-cost hosting, and others offer specialized services. A multi-cloud approach would allow organizations to optimize and make the most of both low-cost and specialized services, as required.

Apart from flexibility, this approach ensures access to a host of tools tailored to specific requirements. This, in turn, enhances performance and indirectly gives innovation an impetus.

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Avoidance of Vendor Lock-in

A multi-cloud model minimizes an organization’s dependency on a single provider and allows it greater control and autonomy. An additional benefit comes in the form of enhanced negotiating power since the organization has multiple providers to choose from.

Lower TCO

Eliminating vendor lock-in also helps organizations manage costs efficiently by spending more on best-of-breed solutions for core business needs and seeking more affordable solutions for lower-priority projects.

Business Resiliency and Disaster Recovery

A multi-cloud model becomes crucial to prevent a full-scale network outage, allowing an organization to ensure business continuity through backups even if there is a service outage.

Compliance and Regulatory Requirements

Multi-cloud allows organizations to comply with regional data sovereignty and data protection laws that may require data to be stored in specific geographies. By having secondary providers who can comply with local regulations, organizations can avoid compliance issues and enter new markets with lesser effort.

Access to New Markets

With multiple providers with access to different geographical regions, the barrier for entry into new regions is lower, and an organization can easily enter new regional markets.

Although multi-cloud comes with its benefits, enterprises must do their due diligence based on their business scenario. For enterprises in the early stages of cloud adoption and transformation journeys, it would be beneficial to start with one cloud provider given the complexity multi-cloud brings in, namely managing costs and budgets, observability, and security. Multi-cloud environment brings a new set of challenges and risks such as -

Complex Cost Management

Each provider has a separate set of billing tools and complex pricing models, which give a siloed view of the cost spent on various services. The prices are computed based on various usage dimensions and often change based on usage. This makes it extremely difficult to track costs across providers and requires constant monitoring and effort to ensure cost-effectiveness. This makes a single pane of glass imperative to manage and monitor costs and budgets across providers.

Siloed Observability

While each cloud service provider provides its own monitoring and auditing tools, these tools lack holistic and overarching view across cloud providers leading to siloed observability. Enterprises need a single pane of glass for correlating, aggregating and analyzing telemetry for applications, infrastructure and networks.

Cybersecurity Challenges

Multi-cloud environments are more vulnerable since the attack surface tends to be larger (across clouds). However, with an efficient and holistic cybersecurity approach that ensures the protection of infrastructure, data, and applications across clouds, an organization can reduce the risk on this front.

The bottom-line is that every organization must assess its unique situation and consider the pros and cons of the multi-cloud before embarking on its journey. Organizations that prioritize flexibility, want to leverage best-of-breed functionalities of different providers, require strong business resiliency options and are equipped to deal with the complexity of its management, should embrace multi-cloud.

Birlasoft- Your Trusted Cloud Service Technology Partner

We help clients in their multi-cloud adoption journeys from strategy to implementation while partnering with hyperscalers (Azure, AWS & GCP), enterprise cloud providers (SAP, Oracle etc.) and Cloud SaaS providers (Salesforce, Adobe, Service Now etc.). We take a comprehensive view of client imperatives and business goals, industry trends and innovations while crafting a multi-cloud strategy and solution that includes a robust architecture foundation, best-of-breed services, efficient operations and observability, holistic security, and streamlined integration.

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