Cloud examination is easier when it’s multiple choice

Nick Hayne, head of professional services at Quiss, says you’re unlikely to find a single cloud platform that meets all your workload requirements or deliver the flexibility you need.

Cloud has had a dramatic impact on the way organisations approach technology, in particular the way they buy and use it to deliver greater flexibility, agility and security compared to the traditional on-premises solution.

Larger organisations continue to pursue a hybrid cloud strategy – mixing private and public Cloud with on-premises resources – while others believe they’ve adopted a hybrid approach, when in fact they have deployed a multi-cloud solution, without often recognising it.

When cloud first became fashionable and there was a scramble, among many, to migrate – so organisations could easily demonstrate they were forward-thinking, and many merely accepted the cloud solutions being pushed without necessarily achieving the best fit with their business objectives.

Now organisations can deploy a multi-cloud strategy, picking and choosing multiple cloud technologies from any number of service providers, both private and public, to arrive at a solution that fits their needs perfectly.

Managing a multi-cloud approach

A multi-cloud approach has obvious advantages, with avoiding single vendor lock-in chief among them. You’re unlikely to find a single cloud platform that meets all your workload requirements or deliver the flexibility you need.

More organisations are spreading infrastructure, applications, workloads, and so on, around multiple clouds for better security, improved features and resilience.

It’s an approach that also helps organisations get more from their IT budget. Using multiple clouds makes it easier to compare and contrast features and pricing, and deliver the cost-savings promised in the original cloud sales pitch.

And remember, you can also ensure your data is protected, backed-up and recoverable following a disaster by not relying on a single resource for everything that keeps your business alive – mitigating risk in the process.

Adopting, migrating to and managing a multi-cloud environment is not without problems, given the mix of service-level agreements (SLAs), contract terms and so on. But partnering with a tech-agnostic managed service provider, with no particular cloud affiliation, is likely to get you what you need and for a price you’re happy to pay.

Once you think you have found the right provider, look carefully beyond the marketing and assess if they want a long-term relationship or a quick profit. Will they onboard you as part of the solution? Is security your problem or theirs, and is backup central to their solution or another vendor’s problem?

And finally, managing a multi-cloud approach will present your IT team, if you have one, with many challenges – so does your chosen service provider offer the technical support you need to ensure resilience and flexibility of the final outcome? If not, walk away and look harder.