Top 4 Advantages to Multi-Cloud Computing

Top 4 Advantages to Multi-Cloud Computing

Gartner predicts that "the 10 biggest public cloud providers will command, at a minimum, half of the total public cloud market until at least 2023." The move to the cloud has been underway for years, however, now we are seeing more of a trend with deploying and optimizing multi-cloud services. We tapped into one of our cloud subject matter experts, Norm Kennedy, and he shared his thoughts on the advantages of multi-cloud computing.

Avoid Vendor Lock-in

If you decide to put all of your cloud needs under the control of one vendor, you cannot easily move your data or IT workloads between one competing vendor to another, or even in some cases between geographical locations. From a customer perspective, using multi-cloud will enable access to resources from different locations. Allowing companies to deploy their applications closer to customers and thus reducing the latency that may be experienced. When a company utilizes multiple cloud providers, they have the flexibility for their employees to work wherever they may need.

Leverage Technologies

Multi-cloud allows you to meet the needs of a diverse organization. Often times a single cloud provider may not offer the best solution to meet a given need. Using multi-cloud computing can offer your company a way to mix and match platforms to take advantage of the best tools that each platform has to offer. Since most cloud platforms cannot match all of the various requirements and workloads for any one organization, trying to choose a single platform may be impossible. For example, you may prefer the analytics tools available from AWS, but their storage options and pricing may not be suitable. Multi-cloud computing allows you to mix the best of one with the best of another freely.

Affordability

There is also a cost advantage when utilizing the most cost-effective provider for a given service. Different vendor price models could lead to significant savings when choosing to provision a resource/service from one vendor vs another. A majority of cloud computing solutions are available at a pay-as-you-go model so a multi-cloud approach could end up being a very affordable option once all services are compared.

Risk Reduction

With multi-cloud deployments, if one vendor has an outage impacting services, the other vendors are most likely still operating. Recently, we have witnessed some notable cloud systems go down and those using multi-cloud computing were not as affected as those solely utilizing one cloud platform. When cloud providers go down you can run the risk of losing revenue but those chances drop while utilizing multi-cloud. "The failure of a top cloud service for just three days could cost the US economy $15 billion" ( Lloyd's 2018).

Takeaways

Whether you are just deciding to increase your cloud presence or adding another cloud vendor to your roster, training your teams on the advantages of each can help increase productivity and build a solid foundation for innovation and growth.

For more information on Cloud training, visit our website for available courses.