How to Implement a Multi-Cloud Strategy

A Multi-cloud strategy involves the implementation of a combination of two or more public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings to host and manage your products and resources. A multi-cloud strategy can help secure business continuity through its redundancy provisions and fail-safe potential.

When executed correctly, a multi-cloud strategy can serve as a strong foundation for your disaster recovery plan. By allowing you to sample offers across different platforms, multi-cloud helps you cut costs and deploy the right platform to the right application and geographic location. A multi-cloud strategy will also save you from vendor lock-in.

How Multi-Cloud Strategy is Deployed

There are different ways of deploying multi-cloud strategies at your workplace. One way is to do your production and development in one cloud environment and then run the application on another platform. Another way is to separate all your production processes across different cloud platforms for example, by separating databases services from from applications. Either way, you need to make some decisions first.

Goals

Cloud computing should be adopted for the benefit of meeting a goal, not just for the fact that it is available all the time. Different organisations require different cloud computing resources, and the strategy that informs the adoption of a multi-cloud strategy should be practical.

For starters, you could adopt a multi-cloud strategy to make it easier and faster to deliver services and applications. Strategies that allow for faster collaboration between business development and developers, for example, would cut down access time for both the customer and the production team.

Another goal could be to increase IT efficiency by tapping into more IT infrastructure without actually expending all the money it would take to deploy it in-house. Whatever it is, your business goals should define how you deploy a multi-cloud strategy.

Choose Your Cloud Options

After stating your goals clearly, it is now time to decide on which cloud computing resources will suit your needs. There are numerous IaaS cloud options to choose from, both managed and self-managed. The right cloud options should take into consideration which applications you will need to run and how suitable the various cloud options are to these apps.

Also, decide whether you need a hosted cloud or an on-premise cloud. You should investigate the cost implications for your specific geography at this moment.

Your choice of cloud platforms should factor in the ability to transition between different platforms with ease. The last thing you want is to suffer vendor lock-in where data stored on one platform can’t be moved to other cloud servers without affecting the integrity of your data.

Beef Up IT Expertise

A multi-cloud strategy adds a layer of complexity to your IT infrastructure. Not only will you have to manage the needs of transferring data between the platforms, you will have to ensure you are doing this securely as well. A 2019 ‘Cloud Adoption and Risk Report’ by McAfee said enterprises suffered 2,269 individual misconfigurations every month due to adopting multi-cloud storage.

To protect your data and cloud computing resources, it is therefore necessary to have the right tools in terms of personnel and firmware. This includes deploying a multi-cloud management platform to help you manage all activities across your serves from a single dashboard. Also, security protocols must be standardized to ensure each team member is taking the right steps to secure data on the different cloud platforms.

Building the right team for your cloud means they will be able to scale the services and offerings to suit each unique situation. Matters regarding recovery, automated provisions, and shared security responsibilities are key decisions that need to be resolved before rolling out the strategy. After all, different cloud computing resources require different levels of attention and detail. Before integrating your systems, be sure you have built a standardized governance structure that will dictate how data moves across the platforms to minimize costs and boost efficiency.

Secure Cloud Automation

Cloud computing can be vast and hard to navigate especially when you want to take advantage of different platforms offerings. A cloud business automation platform allows you to manage these cloud environments from a single dashboard. Whether you are running a private or hosted cloud as part of your multi-cloud strategy, a single automated platform makes it easy to monitor performance in order to free up resources to where they are needed most.

Cloud automation platforms reduce errors and boost productivity by eliminating manual and repetitive processes like sizing, load balancing, and provisioning of resources. Make sure this has the best security you can afford.

All Hands on Board

To successfully implement a multi-cloud strategy, you will require competence across all departments, not just experts in cloud computing. Choosing any cloud environment comes with its own unique billing implications. It is therefore necessary to include competent finance experts in the decision-making process. Legal experts will also help define the compliance effects of whichever SaaS/PaaS you deploy. Privacy policies vary across geographic locations and so having a competent team perusing your contracts and requirements is key to successful implementation.