What to remember when choosing multi-cloud solutions for your business

An okta is a meteorology term which is a unit of measurement that describes the amount of cloud cover at a particular location. With the pace of growth of the virtual cloud technology, we might well soon need to have a similar unit to report how many cloud computing systems or services a given company utilises. That’s because adopting a multi-cloud strategy has become a global trend among today’s businesses and organisations.

In its 2021: State of Multi-cloud study, Turbonomic (a subsidiary of IBM) reveals that about 30 per cent of organisations are currently using three or more clouds.

But for companies, it is vital that they choose only the best parts of cloud solutions provided by multiple vendors, thereby building the ultimate IT environment and an infrastructure that will allow them to run all the processes and operations necessary to scale their businesses.

Companies while building their cloud systems can tap into bits and pieces of the best-priced cloud services on the market. Using those, they will still be able to achieve a very high level of IT performance, besides significantly lowering overall IT expenditures.

There’s also a matter of reliability – with multi-cloud, you don’t have to rely on just one cloud provider anymore, meaning you can use the next cloud as a backup to the last one, if you want. The sky is the limit.

This much flexibility and computing power might seem like a perfect IT scenario in which nothing can go wrong. Well, not exactly. The benefits of the multi-cloud environment can be leveraged, provided that it is implemented and managed correctly. But what does that exactly entail?

What can happen when you mess with the clouds?
The complex nature of the multi-cloud is what makes it difficult to manage. Let’s say you’re using 10 different clouds from 10 different providers, and all of those solutions have different applications. A pessimist might say that this is asking for trouble. You’ll need to have both the skills and the knowledge – and a lot of time and resources, of course – to be able to monitor all of those systems and services effectively.

Also, bear in mind that using several cloud services provided by many different vendors requires more interfacing with external companies. Thus, it involves signing many different contracts and SLAs and agreeing to a broad array of vendor policies. If you’re not careful about the little details, your IT environment can become less transparent. Less transparent could mean inferior performance and thereby open the system to cyberattacks.

So, how can you move freely across the clouds?
There are two approaches to making your multi-cloud environment work as it is supposed to. The first approach involves scaling down your wants to reduce the complexity of the infrastructure. In other words, it is about limiting yourself to a smaller pool of cloud solutions and choosing only the essentials. By doing so, you can have a better view of all the cloud pieces on the IT board and develop a strategy that will bring you success.

However, not only is this approach a bit of a letdown as you’re not free to mix and match clouds to your liking, but it is also more challenging. Why? Because you must do the cloud management part all by yourself. It means you have to take care of mapping workloads, managing cloud resources, establishing connections between the clouds, introducing the proper security measures, as well as solving all infrastructure-related incidents and problems. Unless you have a really big IT department full of highly experienced specialists and engineers, this will not be easy.

Fortunately, there’s another way; the second approach. This one is very simple – you need to team up with a vendor that offers multi-cloud management services.

By doing so, you can escape the responsibility for keeping your clouds in good condition and still make sure they all run like clockwork. Your cloud services provider will be the one to do all of the things listed above, and you will be able to give all your attention to what matters the most – your business. After all, this is what it should be like. You should not worry about whether you will manage to migrate your systems and applications to the cloud or what you should do if one of the clouds goes down. If you use multi-cloud management services, issues like those will be your provider’s concern, not yours.

Where’s the catch?
It will most probably come as no surprise to you that the second approach is becoming the norm across all industries – more and more companies are joining forces with a multi-cloud management services provider, such as Comarch for example, these days. The only thing you have to do to make it work is to team up with a vendor you can trust and rely on to take good care of your multi-cloud environment. There are plenty of providers out there, so choose wisely – your company’s success depends on it.

Maciej Sikora is a senior technical copywriter at Comarch