According to Flexera's State of the Cloud Report 2022, an eye-watering 89% of organizations currently use a multicloud strategy. In simple words, multicloud is skyrocketing in popularity, and with good reason. By strategically leveraging multiple providers, companies can achieve greater efficiencies, become more agile and innovative, take advantage of the economies of scale and boost resiliency and performance in their virtual infrastructure.
As the name would suggest, multicloud environments are where an enterprise uses more than one cloud platform to achieve its goals. A multicloud environment can consist of public, private, and edge clouds, combining on-premise operations with applications offered by multiple public cloud providers. Doing this allows enterprises to experience the benefits of each platform while mitigating their drawbacks.
Choosing a multicloud platform can deliver significant business benefits, so let's get into them.
A 'Single Pane of Glass' View
We live in a world where the average employee uses 36 cloud-based services daily, and the average enterprise uses almost 1,300 cloud services. And while these cloud services offer many benefits, many companies have found managing these environments challenging.
This is largely due to the rapid adoption of cloud services over the last five years. Essentially, when multicloud deployment is happening seemingly weekly, more resources get directed to implementing these individual applications than managing their place within the broader IT ecosystem.
A sprawling, ill-configured, and complex multicloud setup leads to poor visibility, control, and governance challenges. With this lack of visibility, IT workers struggle to make informed decisions on how to best manage the enterprises' operations in the cloud. At the same time, cybersecurity robustness (how well a company can predict, prevent, and respond to cyber threats) becomes increasingly challenging.
That's why the best multicloud platforms today offer a 'single pane of glass' view over the multicloud environment. These platforms enable organizations to monitor and manage applications and workloads across multiple clouds through a single interface, thereby boosting efficiencies. And in recent years, managing complex multicloud architectures has become even more practical and efficient with the introduction of new tools like Kubernetes multicloud. Large enterprises in particular greatly benefit from a 'single pane of glass' multicloud platform.
Competitive Pricing
As the number of multicloud providers continues to grow yearly, organizations have more choice than ever before. This means enterprises can compare providers and secure the best available rates for their specific IT needs. In addition, and critically, since they're not locked into any single provider's terms, they can choose the vendor that offers the most payment flexibility, customizable capacity, and adjustable contracts. The result? Enterprises can focus on their core activities and exploit market opportunities.
Boosted Security and Enhanced Resilience
We touched on this briefly in the first section, but with today's rapidly evolving and increasingly severe cyber threat landscape, cybersecurity needs a section of its own. Having a centralized view over a multicloud environment allows granular control and comprehensive visibility into IT resources.
At the same time, adopting a multicloud strategy (and platform) can offer more robust security in the form of knowledge sharing. Essentially, since cloud providers are responsible for managing the security of their own infrastructures, they can guide enterprises on how to best align their capabilities and protect their data while using the cloud service.
Using multiple cloud services also boosts resiliency because individual cloud services offer backup and recovery capabilities. This provides much-needed continuity and reliability in the event of a disaster, power outage, or cyberattack.
Avoiding Vendor Lock-In
Adopting a multicloud platform means casting a vote for a dedicated multicloud strategy. And organizations that commit to a multicloud strategy become shielded from the gloomy vendor lock-in.
Vendor lock-in happens when it becomes too complex for a company to transfer its business away from one cloud provider to another. Organizations trapped in this cycle find themselves developing solutions that rely heavily on the unique offerings of one particular vendor. And as they invest more heavily in that vendor, switching providers becomes almost impossible due to the high costs, sky-high complexity, and costly time investment.
Fostering Innovation
Multicloud platforms allow organizations to align workloads with the cloud service that best fits the specific use case. As a result, organizations can dramatically reduce or even eliminate pain points in their day-to-day operations and development projects. At the same time, intelligent multicloud platforms utilize multi-region capabilities to offer ultra-low latency and near 100% availability of cloud services.
Faster Deployment
One of the fastest-growing multicloud trends is to use containers to deploy applications faster, and leading multicloud platform providers are responding to this trend. These container technologies like Kubernetes and Docker enable developers to build, package, and deploy applications at breakneck speed.
Since containers are self-contained environments, developers can focus on application logic and dependencies and spend less time worrying about configurations and platform versions.
Reducing Costs
Multicloud environments can quickly become costly, but opting for a dedicated multicloud platform provider can dramatically cut costs. For example, many providers allow you to pay for only what you consume (CPU/RAM/egress workloads) and the tools you use. At the same time, AI is increasingly leveraged in multicloud solutions and especially multicloud platforms to scale and manage multicloud deployments. This can lead to further cost savings by reducing runtime costs.
Reducing or Eliminating Shadow IT
Shadow IT (the use of devices, applications, and services not approved by the IT department) is a top concern for enterprises today, and with good reason. Alarming studies by Gartner have found that up to 40% of IT spending in large enterprises goes to Shadow IT. And research by other firms has put this figure even higher, close to 50%[1]. Shadow IT expands the digital attack surface and leaves organizations vulnerable and powerless to cyberattacks. Luckily, multicloud platforms can significantly reduce this risk with their 'single pane of glass' view.
Final Thoughts
It's no surprise that multicloud solutions dominate the modern IT landscape. However, many companies embarking on a multicloud strategy are spending too much money and adding needless complexity to their IT environment. Multicloud platforms help overcome these challenges and empower enterprises to cut costs while boosting performance, security, and control.
Multi-cloud systems are becoming increasingly popular, and this trend shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. As multi-cloud strategies grow more entrenched in all businesses, it is more important than ever to ensure that you can optimize your multi-cloud strategy while protecting and securing your most strategic resource: your data.
Contact Datacenters.com today for a free demo to see how easy a multicloud deployment can be for your organization. Don’t have time for a demo? Spin up servers in a matter of minutes and customize your environment.
