Why a multicloud solution is better for your business

Are you using only one public cloud vendor? Maybe it is time you re-evaluate to reap maximum benefits out of your cloud investments

Ten years ago, moving to cloud was considered an achievement or rather a unique step towards digitization. However, today with cloud becoming a business imperative, the baton lies with the organisations to have advanced and customized strategies that allow them to have an extensive competitive advantage. The overall Indian public cloud services market is expected to reach $10.8 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 24.1% for 2020-25 as per the IDC report. This testifies to the fact that cloud will be omnipresent and it will be up to each individual organisation to strategically design their cloud strategies in order to gain complete value out of it. As many businesses still struggle to completely embrace cloud due to a lack of awareness and understanding, you already are ahead if you have accepted cloud as part of your business. However, your decision to stick to one cloud hasn’t kept up with the times.  Each cloud was designed to solve a different problem and as you try to migrate more complex and demanding workloads, you might find shortcomings in performance, incurred unexpected cost overruns, and experienced mismatches between the cloud’s architecture and your enterprise workloads.

While there are various ways to deal with these issues and gain maximum return on your cloud investments however, multicloud can prove to be a highly sophisticated and beneficial environment for many businesses. Like any and every other technology, supplier diversity is a necessity to not only avoid vendor lock-in but to also leverage benefits that each specific cloud provider brings. Using multiple clouds gains an organisation a necessary competitive advantage, geographic resilience, and also pricing leverage.

Choosing the right cloud provider

Many a times an enterprise chooses to retain workloads on premises despite them being pro-cloud, cloud-first or cloud-only considering they witnesses various difficulties in migrating these workloads to the cloud provider of their choice.

To further understand this, we can segment many enterprise workloads into four categories:
Web-scale or mobile-scale is the first category which responds to vast changes in demand and the second one is productivity workloads which supports many users in a steady state of usage for example document sharing, identity verification, and group communications. Both of these workload types share a similar design pattern according to which they compartmentalize activities and add more resources as needed for an increase in demand. Many cloud providers, by design were built to cater to these workloads and still do.

This sounds easier right?

However, most enterprise workloads fall into the remaining two categories which are systems of record or process control and HPC. Under these, scale out isn’t applicable and component failure isn’t acceptable. This means that the offerings of most clouds don’t match with the design of most enterprise workloads.

HPC especially needs raw performance provided by bare metal servers, unencumbered by hypervisors, and connected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networks that join these servers into a distributed system. The key is to not over commit the network. We have witnessed that surges in traffic in web-scale applications can completely swamp even high-bandwidth networks. This in return can impact nearby workloads that share underlying infrastructure. It has become common as a resource-saving design practice for the cloud vendors to over commit the network.

Accepting the multicloud world

It is no longer about which cloud to use, but which clouds can help gain the most value for your organisation. According to Gartner, four out of five companies surveyed are already using at least two public clouds. This supports the fact that the multicloud world is here and organisations must learn to embrace it.

Multicloud allows business to connect the best services and capabilities of each cloud and leverage it for their advantage. My suggestion is that enterprises must move their data with as little friction between clouds. Ultimately, we all know and understand that the early adopters of cloud truly were able to reap benefits in the last few years while others were still reluctant causing them to be left far behind in the competitive race. So will be the case with multicloud. Organisations willing to accept the viable trends early on will be the ones to deliver quality experience to their end customers.

The article has been written by Kapil Makhija, Vice President-Technology (Cloud), Oracle India