4 Key Benefits of a Multi-Cloud Strategy

According to RightScale 2018 survey, the multi-cloud strategy is one of the key pillars of their cloud strategies among enterprises. Overall 81% of enterprises have adopted the multi-cloud strategy.

But what could be the primary reasons for the multi-cloud strategy being so attractive to today's enterprises? We will try to dig into this question today and understand the benefits of a Multi-Cloud Strategy.

At a high level, the major 4 benefits of the multi-cloud strategy are,

• Vendor lock-in
• Protecting existing investments
• The total cost of ownership
• Achieving SLA(s)

https://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-industry-insights/cloud-computing-trends-2018-state-cloud-survey#multi-cloud

Vendor lock-in

Moving workloads to the cloud is a costly affair and so it is to move out of the existing cloud. A single cloud provider hosting all workloads may look lucrative initially. But that also gives us the opportunity to cloud vendors to increase prices and there is no other way apart from paying those prices. Also, it limits the agility towards business requirements in terms of workload performance and costs. The only option in such a scenario is to create another migration plan which costs more.

Protecting existing investments

Some cloud vendors might allow porting of the existing software license to their environment while some may want you to buy new ones. It is important to protect existing investments not only in hardware but also in software licenses.

Total Cost of Ownership

Every cloud vendor offers three basic services that comprise compute, storage, networking, and other application services. The prices of computing differ substantially amongst different cloud vendors such as AWS, GCP, and AZURE. It is important to understand which cloud provider helps us achieve our workload objective at optimum cost. After all basic premise of moving to the cloud is to improve operational efficiencies while saving on OPEX.

Achieving Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Every business service must meet with predefined SLA. Once the workloads are moved to the cloud, SLAs either should improve or remain as before migration to the cloud environment. Every cloud vendors have different regions. If one of the cloud regions are not available where most of your customer accessing your services then multi-cloud strategy gives an opportunity to mix and match cloud environments and their services. This helps in maintaining SLAs.

Read more on cloud computing,

• What is cloud computing?

• Checklist: How do I choose Cloud Service Provider?

• How to avoid cloud vendor lock-in with multi-cloud strategy

• 4 key factors to measure cloud RO

As a closing comment, the multi-cloud strategy offers the opportunity to take the best of all cloud vendors and tailor the solutions to meet business requirements at the best possible cost.