Achieving the Business Benefits of the Multi-cloud Barrier Breakdown
November 14, 2020Businesses now understand that it’s a competitive priority to seek the many benefits of a multi-cloud strategy. But achieving the many possibilities that multi cloud offers brings many challenges that may require support from cloud services providers.
The benefits of multi cloud include the ability to migrate applications and workloads across platforms, which is a boon for businesses where distributed workloads drive faster access. Equally important are the ability of a multi-cloud strategy to support increased uptime via broader disaster recovery and business continuity options . This intersects with the potential for lower costs through strategic application placement.
These are important benefits to businesses ranging from startups to global enterprises working across every sector. This goes hand in hand with the benefit that multi-cloud strategies will lower vendor dependencies for two-thirds of organizations by 2024, according to Gartner.
Taking Advantage of Expanding Cloud Provider Options
The ongoing competition between cloud providers drives innovation of services and options to businesses. One example is how Gartner believes that the major cloud providers will soon move to an ATM-like approach for some services. This enables cloud providers to meet the low latency requirement needs of crucial applications along with other business needs.
The plurality and similarity of services sets the stage for barrier breakdowns among cloud providers as solutions like Google Anthos further remove provider silos. But taking advantage of these advances will still require cloud management services providers to help businesses make interconnectivity and strategy decisions that meet specific needs.
That’s why multi-cloud strategies must focus on business needs to address issues like vendor lock-in and application low latency access, security and general cost reduction needs. These aspects straddle other challenge areas like ensuring cloud governance and compliance that make cloud decisions more complex.
Cloud computing service providers help businesses navigate these decisions and take advantage of the strengths of different cloud platforms. The pandemic, a tight labor market, and changing technology make it hard for enterprises to find staff with the multi-cloud skills they need. Cloud services providers can augment that need through consulting support and remote hands among other services to meet a variety of multi-cloud strategy challenges.
Meeting Multi-Cloud Strategy Challenges
Managing hybrid cloud and an overall multi-cloud strategy comes down to a thoughtful assessment about which cloud attributes best serve an organization’s specific needs.
Although cloud vendors provide monitoring a turnkey, merged view solution across different cloud providers or environments isn’t necessarily part of the mix.
As a business’s use of the cloud expands, application management and cloud sprawl become interconnected challenges that can lead to increased costs and deep inefficiencies. One example would be the use of redundant applications and shadow IT. Then there are the severe cost overruns of poor resource provisioning where developers aren’t managing utilization as they spin up developer environments across different providers.
The Gartner article cited earlier points to the challenges of the complexity of offerings and tools from cloud providers and the universal lack of in-house IT expertise with all major cloud provider offerings. It’s best to navigate these siloed vendor tools and cloud offerings through the support of cloud management service providers that have a global reach and established cloud provider relationships. These partners are best positioned to provide multi-cloud consulting strategy implementation support through tools and offerings expertise across the major cloud providers.
The Benefits of a Multi-cloud Strategy Consulting Partner
Cloud service providers can serve the dual role of being the single access point to all cloud providers with the skilled expertise and customization that delivers the following:
- Migration consulting support within the target industry
- Cost and savings identification based multi-cloud strategy consulting
- Maximizing benefits of the ATM-like presence of cloud providers with distributed workloads via access to internet exchanges, global interconnectivity and customized connectivity options for scalability, security, speed, cost control, and bandwidth options.
Cloud providers will continue to expand their offerings to provide more application and workload options for businesses. But it still falls to the business to understand how to make the most of those options through a customized multi-cloud strategy. To learn how Telehouse can help bridge that strategy gap with IT cloud consulting and management services.