As organizations evaluate the future of their on-premise data centers and infrastructure, there are still many businesses grappling with whether they should move to the cloud and what the strategy should look like. IT and Business leaders not only need to consider on-premise vs. cloud, but also private vs. public cloud and even strategies that utilize a combination of options such as hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud.
While the term ‘multi-cloud’ seems like it might lead to added complexity, the reality is cloud services are becoming more of a commodity that organizations are assessing which platform best fits their specific business requirement or which offers most competitive pricing at a given time. As businesses are driving hard to become more agile, they are also looking for flexibility to quickly and easily switch cloud platforms as and when their requirements or strategy shifts.
What is a Multi-Cloud Strategy?
Quite simply, multi-cloud refers to usage of more than one cloud platform for your IT infrastructure. This differs slightly from hybrid-cloud which refers to architectures comprised of on-premise and cloud assets. Many enterprise organizations are using a hybrid-cloud strategy at least for the time being since it is no easy task to migrate extensive legacy footprints built up over years and decades.
Even if you have a hybrid-cloud setup, you can still use a multi-cloud approach. There are several shapes a multi-cloud approach can take, including use of one or more public clouds (think of the big three — AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure), use of public and private cloud (such as Pivotal Cloud Foundry), or combination with an organization’s internally developed private cloud.
Understanding the Benefits of Multi-Cloud Strategy
Organizations that use more than one cloud platform typically do so because they find that one cloud meets a specific requirement over other clouds but doesn’t meet all requirements. For example, an organization my find that one cloud platform provides desired features, functionality or security for a certain application, but that another cloud provides a platform better suited to build their enterprise data lake.
Another reason we see organizations using multi-cloud is to mitigate cost risk. Competition in cloud space is fierce and large enterprises are on the lookout for best rates. With pay-as-you-go pricing, organizations are no longer locked into lengthy contracts. If IT leaders see savings by shifting workloads from one cloud to another, they may be more inclined to do so.
The Impact of Multi-Cloud Strategy
Having multiple clouds to manage can increase complexity but also affords certain advantages such as those listed above, including flexibility and cost control. Today, cloud providers are making it easier for their customers to move data and applications to another cloud platform.
The major cloud providers also recognize that multi-cloud is the way organizations are starting to think and are building tools and capabilities to facilitate. One example is Google BigQuery Omni. According to Forbes, BigQuery Omni is a “flexible, multi-cloud analytics solution, powered by Anthos, that enables you to analyze data from a single pane of glass across your datasets in Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Azure (coming soon).”
Multi-Cloud with Bitwise
With a wide range of clients at different stages of cloud adoption, Bitwise focuses on innovation to help our clients keep pace with the accelerated evolution of technology. The following provide a couple examples:
When using our Application Modernization solutions to help our clients migrate applications to the cloud, Bitwise engineers the application in as neutral a manner as possible so that if leadership decides to move to a different provider six months or a year from now, we can quickly and easily port the application over without needing to go through the entire re-engineering process we just completed.
Hydrograph, an ETL development tool for big data offered by Bitwise, was engineered with hybrid and multi-cloud in mind in that it uses a pluggable architecture where the compute layer can easily be switched between AWS, GCP, Azure or on-premise Spark without having to make a single change to the data workflow code. This means you can have workflows running on Spark one day and Google BigQuery the next.
Takeaways
As cloud becomes a standard component of IT strategy, portability is a key feature that organizations need to consider when selecting cloud providers and tools as well as the approach they use to migrate or modernize their applications on the cloud.
With so many business applications already running in the cloud, IT leaders may have little choice but to incorporate hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. Rather than try to push the organization down a single path, we see this as an opportunity to analyze and leverage the strength of on-premise, private and public cloud options and build a strategy that maximizes their benefits to your advantage.
Explore Bitwise’s Application Modernization approach.
