Massimo Bandinelli, Aruba Cloud Marketing Manager, explains why more businesses are choosing multi-cloud.
As businesses continue to roll out digital transformations, in a bid to stay competitive, adopting flexible solutions to meets a business’ evolving needs is increasingly important. It is for this reason that multi-cloud solutions have grown in popularity in recent years, offering a scalable and cost-efficient solution for businesses.
So, with up to 92% of enterprises choosing multi-cloud solutions over single-cloud providers, what has driven this skyrocketing popularity and what does the future hold for multi-cloud?
How do multi-cloud solutions work?
Put simply, a multi-cloud solution is created by combining multiple cloud service providers, to form one bespoke solution for a business. A number of different types of multi-cloud solutions currently exist on the market, including hybrid cloud (combining public and private clouds), distributed cloud (deploying resources across geographically dispersed data centres), and edge computing (processing data closer to where it’s generated).
By combining various providers, a multi-cloud solution can be built to meet an organisation’s specific needs. So, what are some of the benefits multi-cloud users can enjoy?
A cost-effective choice
Most businesses are keen to cut back on costs as much as possible, as long as it does not impact business operations. By adopting a multi-cloud solution, customers can enjoy reduced infrastructure costs through resource sharing and ‘pay-as-you-go’ pricing models.
By utilising tools such as real-time monitoring, cloud usage can be optimised. This allows IT departments to reduce costs without taking away from the availability of applications and databases.
Offering flexibility
Multi-cloud solutions offer businesses the freedom to scale their solution when needed, allowing them to add or remove resources essentially whenever they want. Whether a business needs additional application servers, cloud services, databases, failover capabilities, or storage drives – a multi-cloud solution can easily accommodate individual needs. This can be highly beneficial for companies looking to expand their IT infrastructure as it does not require any sacrifice of performance along the way.
Multi-cloud solutions are also ideal for businesses that want to avoid significant capital investment in their cloud solutions upfront, as they allow businesses to scale across multiple providers and platforms when needed, as a business grows.
Avoiding vendor lock-in
Vendor lock-in poses a number of risks for an IT department. By relying heavily on a single provider, your business runs the risk of having no choice but to stay with their services and prices for years. As multi-cloud solutions allow businesses to effectively mix and match services from different providers, vendor lock-ins can be avoided easily. This is why multi-cloud solutions are increasingly appealing.
Improved security
Multi-cloud solutions also offer multiple layers of security, so businesses can expect to benefit from improved security and reduced risk of failure with this type of system in place. Many multi-cloud solutions come with built-in, disaster recovery capabilities to ensure the safe and accessible storage of data in case of unexpected events.
For added protection, businesses can choose to implement failover mechanisms. In the case of external attack or system failures, failover mechanisms automatically transfer processing tasks from one cloud drive to another. This reduces downtime for a system and protects data, making it both a cost and security benefit.
Staying compliant
By providing a flexible cloud environment, multi-cloud offerings can make compliance with specific industry or regional regulations easier. Businesses have the freedom to choose services depending on the types of regulation they face, pulling together a custom solution that fits best.
Data sovereignty is a factor that is certainly worth keeping in mind when opting for a multi-cloud solution. This type of offering allows organisations to store sensitive data on-site and less sensitive data in the public cloud, saving an organisation a number of legal issues and ensuring they remain compliant with data sovereignty laws.
For example, if an EU company uses a US-based cloud service provider, the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act, that governs any data processed by a US cloud service provider, would allow US authorities to ask for data belonging to the EU business be handed over to them. A multi-cloud strategy makes managing compliance much easier by allowing the storage of more sensitive personal data on premise or with a regional cloud service provider.
The future of multi-cloud
With clear benefits for businesses, it is unlikely that multi-cloud will be going away anytime soon. When orchestrated effectively, businesses can benefit from unparalleled digital dexterity, allowing businesses to stay competitive. As your business looks to grow and scale up, a flexible multi-cloud solution can provide companies with better performance and fewer delays, improving operational efficiency.
