By Raghav K.
Multi cloud can be public, private, or both. The only thing that makes the architecture multi cloud is using two or more cloud service providers in the mix. Not long ago, the hybrid cloud was a breakthrough. Public cloud and private cloud resource management was the ultimate solution to maintain the security of a private cloud and add features of a public cloud.
Organizations use multi-cloud environments to distribute computing resources and minimize downtimes to curb any data loss scenarios. Multi cloud can increase the computing power of an organization and enable more enhanced and feature-rich deployment, which a single cloud provider may not be able to provide.
Gartner stated, “By 2023, the leading cloud service providers will have a distributed ATM-like presence to serve a subset of their services. Multi-cloud strategies will reduce vendor dependency for two-thirds of organizations through 2024. However, this will primarily happen in ways other than application portability.”
It would be naïve to say one cloud provider could harness the power and feature set of all other cloud providers. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have their own set of positive traits and shortcomings, but Alibaba Cloud has been the industry leader in significant ways. A multi cloud will leverage the potential of all these service providers and services that may have an edge on other providers.
The multi-cloud approach lets you implement a solution using different cloud vendors. These vendors have specializations and fortes. One organization harnessing a multi-cloud vendor approach transcends a roll of computing power and gives the organization an edge over the competition.
"Currently, the average organization uses 2.2 public and 2.2 private clouds. Organizations are also experimenting with an additional 1.2 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds." - A quote from Flexera
Alibaba Cloud has an edge with the Elastic Compute Service (ECS), DevOps, and the security infrastructure compared to similar companies. When you include another cloud provider, it should enhance the overall infrastructure you wish to deploy.
The choice of multiple cloud environments can take away shortcomings, add functionality to your deployment scenario, and prevent vendor lock-in. Maintaining up-time is another crucial point for organizations. Multi cloud allows for zero downtime by mitigating risks to multiple public cloud vendors.
Multi cloud offers the benefits associated with multiple cloud providers. This enhances the overall experience in terms of usability and performance. Security is a paramount concern, and multi cloud can leverage security from multiple cloud providers. Alibaba Cloud security services are among the best-in-class. They can offer a remarkable advantage when in a multi-cloud environment. The Anti-DDoS Origin service retains the functionality to secure resources connected to Alibaba Cloud, and these resources work with on-premises setups or another cloud provider.
While every solution has its challenges, multi cloud architecture is a low-risk. It offers better business continuity, so your enterprise can continue operating if some resources fail. You can use multiple redundancies instead of depending on one resource. You can define the security responsibilities of different resources since a third-party vendor will handle security.
Your workloads have been split between different cloud providers, and bridging the gap between service cycles is one of the biggest challenges. You need to spend more time with a detailed outline of security services, parameters, and resource handling.
Today’s IT industry today faces some of the biggest challenges it has ever faced while recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitating services for productivity and operations. Every cloud provider must consider the remote work or work from home approaches.
Multi cloud is a way to choose the best services and prices across the board. The best functionality, resources, price points are what matters to customers and enterprises most.
A multi cloud environment is the best setup to have during a service outage due to some system malfunction or a DDoS attack. multi cloud setups distribute your resources across different networks. The chances of all your cloud providers going offline at once are nigh on impossible. multi cloud averts any single point of failure.
If one cloud provider faces an untimely outage due to some malfunction or an attack, the other provider-based services will continue to operate normally while you recover your services. Alibaba Cloud has geo-redundancies and provides excellent business continuity, intelligence, and availability, and superb disaster recovery scenarios to cope up with similar situations.
My next article will focus on managing a multi-cloud environment, but I will make a few points.
Multi cloud is a fairly new system. Evolution with cloud services is at a peak and defining new peaks rapidly. At this pace, new and improved user connectivity scenarios will pop-up, and the front-runners in this system will be the cloud providers. Multi cloud takes away the competition from the top-level cloud providers. The business process changes from delivering a solution by cutting costs (while maintaining the quality of service) to maintaining the quality of service throughout the lifecycle (with a standard service level agreement spanning multi-cloud providers.)
There are more challenges and complexities to face since multi cloud is a new environment. You will need a highly skilled IT team to develop and manage the multi-cloud. The platform is inter-dependent on providers and backend management teams. An overlay needs to be put in place to effectively manage and leverage the multi-cloud environment and reap its unlimited potential.
“Today’s cloud migration strategies tend more toward lift-and-shift than toward modernization or refactoring. However, lift-and-shift projects do not develop native-cloud skills.” -- a quote from Gartner
A skillful combination of professionals working towards a solution that is capable and elastic will also require cloud-native skills.
Cloud computing has unlimited potential. It is a resource that can achieve and work through layers of complexities you do not need to manage. The cloud provides fully-managed services, managed platforms, and solutions that allow you to deploy applications.
Alibaba Cloud provides the services and infrastructure to help organizations work through difficult times and maintain business continuity.
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