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Marching towards a multi-cloud future

While cloud has proved to be a major enabler for business continuity and transformation, as seen in the pandemic.

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DQINDIA Online
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While the cloud has proved to be a major enabler for business continuity and transformation, as seen in the pandemic, it’s time to step up to a multi-cloud phase

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From financial information to customer and product records, data has become the most important technology resource for businesses and individuals across the globe. With more powerful and agile computation, richer software, and smarter analytics, mobility, and sensors, data can be accessed faster for critical business decisions and insights – thanks to the cloud.

Gartner reports that 81% of enterprises collaborate with two or more public cloud providers, to distribute their workloads across multiple cloud environments.

Cloud computing has allowed businesses to lower storage and computation costs, garner more data streams from more sources, and gain the capacity to provide stronger insights. Moreover, many organisations leveraged the cloud as a critical facilitator in digital transformation, especially during the pandemic, as they needed their workforce to be remotely operated and be available for their consumers. Small businesses have also leveraged the cloud as a tool for asset optimisation and identifying under-utilised resources, helping in cost savings and business recovery.

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The multi-cloud game

Gartner reports that 81% of enterprises collaborate with two or more public cloud providers. It empowers enterprises to distribute their workloads across multiple cloud environments, increasing efficiency and cost savings and mitigating risks related to individual cloud architectures. As cloud adoption grows, especially in larger enterprises, multiple departments have started moving mission-critical applications to public cloud infrastructure for greater accessibility, customisation, and optimised use – giving rise to a ‘multi-cloud’ environment.

Google Cloud can empower enterprise operations to create simple and scalable environments with a single unified way of managing all cloud environments.

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A multi-cloud approach allows businesses to use optimal infrastructure for their demand. For example, the approach allows organisations to be agile and flexible. Companies can pick multiple cloud service partners, depending on the business needs. While multi-cloud deployment may require scaling operations, upskilling, and allocating bandwidth, it delivers customised data storage and management that enables businesses to scale up projects and be at par with global peers. That’s one of the critical factors why Google Cloud can empower enterprise operations to create simple and scalable environments with a single unified way of managing all cloud environments. It is committed to meeting the needs of customers by providing choice, flexibility, and openness. Moreover, the flexibility to run applications wherever users need them without added complexity has been a key factor of Anthos – as many consumers want to keep using their on-premise and other cloud infrastructure, but have a common layer of management without a high overhead.

Google in the game

As a contemporary applications platform for both hybrid and multi-cloud systems, Anthos allows clients to run their extensive software portfolio – including apps, data, and infrastructure – on-premises, in a single cloud, or across many clouds in a cohesive way. Combined with Google Cloud’s BigQuery Omni, a versatile, multi-cloud analytics solution powered by Anthos, organisations can examine and analyse data across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Azure from a single pane of glass – progressing the ‘anywhere analytics’ strategy, which can help so many small enterprises achieve business success through fast, accurate and intelligent data insights.

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Truly leveraging a multi-cloud environment means being flexible and taking advantage of the right cloud at the right time. It offers a rich set of cloud options to mitigate critical issues across a diverse range of computing and business functions; it enables a secure combination of shifting workloads between private and public clouds, which is cost-effective; and it facilitates minimum server hops leveraging proximity usage that augments low latency. Moreover, a multi-cloud infrastructure empowers enterprises to blend platforms and vendors so that the workloads are not locked in, eventually resulting in higher autonomy of addressing business concerns. And lastly, since enterprises are not ‘putting all their eggs in one basket, they can react proactively to mitigate risks whenever required.

After major disruption due to the pandemic in 2020, the need for a modern technology stack is driving multi-cloud adoption. However, enterprises must consider multi-cloud as a new thought process/strategy, rather than just another technology that needs to be adopted. It is imperative today for organisations to make optimal workload-to-cloud placement decisions during their journey to complete digital transformation; but more importantly, it’s about choosing the right cloud strategy and the right partner to harness the power of the cloud to achieve their transformation goals.

Anil-Bhansali

Anil Bhansali is VP Engineering & Head of India Development Center, Google Cloud.

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