What is Multi Cloud:
Multi cloud is a cloud approach made up of more than 1 cloud service, from more than 1 cloud vendor — Public or Private.It is the use of multiple cloud computing and storage services in a single network architecture.
The combination of cloud looks like — Public — Public Or Private — Private. If you mix and match then it will be called a Hybrid Cloud :)
Multi cloud represents more than 1 cloud deployment of the same type and it can be public or private cloud, sourced from different cloud providers.
Multi Cloud Example:
You have an enterprise application in a public cloud to support a specific customer-facing application with highly variable use rates. After some research, you find the public cloud provider that has the right blend of service-level agreements (SLA),Security, and up time to host your custom application. You’re happy with your choice. But eventually, customers start asking for features that are only available through a different vendor’s proprietary app. Integrating these features into your custom app requires that you not only purchase the vendor’s app, but also host the app in that vendor’s proprietary public cloud — a solution that allows both apps to scale with demand.
You now have a multi cloud.
This means you can use Google cloud to serve your US users and Microsoft Azure for your customers in Europe.
Or you might use Azure SQL for your databases and Cognito for user management while using AWS EC2 instances and Load Balancing, all for a single application.
Multi Cloud Strategies:
A multi-cloud strategy allows companies to select different cloud services from different providers because some are better for certain tasks than others. For example, some cloud platforms specialize in large data transfers or have integrated machine learning capabilities. Organizations implement a multi-cloud environment for the following reasons:
Choice / Flexibility → Gives you flexibility and the ability to avoid vendor lock-in.
Regulatory Compliance → Can help enterprises achieve their goals for governance, risk management and compliance regulations
Cost → You can identify the options that will meet your workload performance requirements at the cheapest cost
Backup and Disaster Recovery→ Makes your services resilient / Highly available
Best of Breed → You can choose the exact cloud service that best drives your business needs.
Reality Check:
Security → There are a lot of factors that make a multi cloud strategy not ideal for most use-cases.From a security perspective, whether it’s a small startup or a big organization. Multi cloud strategy makes a little to no sense other than may be hitting a SaaS here and there.
Going multi cloud puts a lot of strain on the security team.It takes a lot of time and effort to understand and learn those different services, how permissions work and so forth.
Avoid Lowest common Denominator → We need to consider the technical and security debt being accumulated by making these decisions. But when it comes to deployment,operations,setting up and monitoring security, those things become -
- Significantly harder and requires more effort when dealing with more than one system.
- With security and Operational problems, you end up with some sort of lowest common denominator rather than being able to use the best practices you could when using a particular cloud provider.
Management / Skill Set / Expertise → Multi-cloud management involves workload or application management in multi-cloud computing as information moves from one cloud platform to another. This requires an organization to possess an expertise in multiple cloud providers and complex cloud management.
Data Governance / Policies → You need to define a clear governance and policies while dealing with multi clouds.
How to implement a multi cloud strategy successfully?
You need to define a stack as said below to have a smoother multi cloud journey.
Why do organisations do Multi cloud?
“Customer Focus”
