What Is a Multi-cloud Strategy and Why Should You Care?
More and more often, you hear the term ‘multi-cloud’ within both small and big organizations. But what does it mean exactly? Why should you opt for it? What are the most common challenges for organizations to overcome when they follow a multi-cloud strategy?
What Is Multi-Cloud Anyway?
But let’s start at the beginning: what is multi-cloud anyway? It means that an organization uses more than two cloud computing and cloud storage services, which are managed as a single environment.
Some of these well-known public clouds are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Google Cloud. You also have a private cloud – which is customized for one company – and cloud environments that are a mix of private and public, often dubbed hybrid.
In the past, companies mainly had their own private clouds, often installed in their own data centers. Then, slowly, many organizations noticed how convenient it could be to work in the cloud and switched en masse to public clouds.
However, quickly migrating everything turned out to be quite complex, and the dependence on a single public cloud service provider was not so convenient after all. So multi-cloud became the new way of work.
Why Are Companies Adopting a Multi-Cloud Approach?
Almost every organization today works with cloud technology in some form. The advantage is that you get access to a lightning-fast, sophisticated, budget-friendly, and flexible IT environment.
A multi-cloud strategy can be the right tactic to use the best service from the best provider or to reduce the dependency on one supplier.
What Obstacles Can You Run Into?
But a multi-cloud strategy also creates obstacles. For example, it can lead to inefficiency, loss of work speed, too much complexity, and sometimes you have to focus extra on security.
Something else to consider is choosing the right public cloud(s). Each cloud is broadly similar, but there are differences between them. It is important to understand the implications that come with the choice of a provider of particular services from a provider. It makes sense to dive into the specifics when it comes to areas such as security, user experience, the ability to automate, and other underlying infrastructure.
Which Mix Do You Go For?
Which cloud solutions you choose will depend on your needs and which problems you want to solve. But remember that the cloud must help you, its limitations should not keep you from reaching your goals.
Instead, focus on so-called ‘portable knowledge’ – such as optimizing your development environment, learning a fronted framework like Flutter, and going deep into several programming languages to write excellent and testable code – to make a difference.
Additionally, by choosing the ‘Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP)’ – with a complex open-source system like Kubernetes or something similar as a base and surrounding it with more specific systems to fine-tune – and thinking carefully about where you run all your software, you will get the most out of your multi-cloud.
Google Cloud
Google Cloud fits well into any cloud strategy, be it as the only cloud platform in an organization or as part of a multi-cloud approach. They offer everything you need to build your business from a platform like Anthos to build apps with, a tool such as Vision AI to track emotion, to various Data Analytics Tools. The engineering principles are comparable to other cloud platforms, but the technologies and services are different.