Scale your business through multi-cloud strategies

According to a 2023 study, multi-cloud solutions are quickly becoming the standard in enterprise technology. The study highlights that 98% of organisations either use or expect to utilise services from at least two cloud infrastructure providers, with 31% relying on four or more.

Similarly, 96% of respondents stated that they currently use or plan to use services from at least two cloud application providers, with over half using applications from five or more. This demonstrates the growing importance of multi-cloud strategies for modern businesses.

But what exactly is a multi-cloud strategy? A multi-cloud network combines public and private clouds, on-premises data, and application administration. Also, without a comprehensive multi-cloud strategy, businesses may struggle to scale and thrive in a secure future.

In this article, we help you navigate the process of implementing these cloud scaling strategies in your organisation. We’ll also discuss the benefits of multi-cloud deployment and how to monitor it post-implementation. Read along!

Introduction to multi-cloud strategies

A multi-cloud strategy refers to the using cloud computing services from more than one cloud supplier. For most enterprises, this typically involves leveraging platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions from multiple cloud services providers.

These solutions aim to provide a vendor-agnostic approach, enabling organisations to deploy applications and services across multiple cloud infrastructures built on open-source, cloud-native technologies. Moreover, with a multi-cloud strategy, organisations can choose their preferred services from each cloud provider based on factors like costs, technical requirements, geographic availability, and more. 

In addition to leveraging individual cloud providers, many enterprises also turn to multi-cloud solutions offered by Tata Communications. Tata Communications provides integrated multi-cloud management platforms that allow organisations to seamlessly combine and manage resources from AWS, Azure, GCP, and other cloud services. This approach enhances flexibility, scalability, and resilience, ensuring businesses can optimise their cloud environments.

Understanding the benefits of multi-cloud

Organisations can reduce service disruptions by dispersing workloads across multiple cloud platforms. If one cloud platform encounters an outage or technical issue, the workload can be effortlessly transferred to another provider, assuring continuous access to resources and services.

A few more pointers that emphasise the benefits of these cloud scaling strategies are:

• Removes vendor lock-in: Hybrid cloud solutions prevent companies from being locked into a single cloud provider’s services, infrastructure, and pricing model. It eliminates artificial barriers and excessive fees that providers may impose for cloud migration.

• Resilience: Multi-cloud provides resilience by allowing businesses to retrieve information and transfer processes as needed when an outage occurs, ensuring business continuity. It also offers leverage and the ability to avoid vendor lock-in, improving overall reliability.

• Compliance: A multi-cloud strategy, combined with on-premises data centres, is typically the most efficient and cost-effective approach for ensuring compliance with various data privacy regulations.

• Improved performance: A multi-cloud strategy allows organisations to combine workloads between public and private cloud providers, enabling them to choose the best-suited provider for their specific needs, whether it’s IaaS, PaaS, or specialised offerings like machine learning or blockchain applications.

Key components of multi-cloud strategy

A robust multi-cloud architecture includes centralised monitoring, which gathers logs and data from all of your clouds and keeps them in one location. With the correct dashboards, analytics, and visualisation tools, you can get a comprehensive understanding of your multi-cloud environment, thereby boosting your security posture. Apart from this, here are a few more key components of a multi-cloud architecture strategy:

Programmability

Multi-cloud solutions prioritise programmability, enabling dynamic adjustments and interactions across diverse infrastructure elements, including private networks and public cloud resources. This programmability is crucial for seamlessly connecting and managing different components in a multi-cloud environment.

API-First Approach

A multi-cloud networking architecture focuses on API consumption, supporting seamless data sharing and visibility across different cloud providers. This approach abstracts the complexities of individual cloud providers, making it easier for network teams to manage hybrid cloud solutions.

Network as a Service (NaaS)

NaaS is a consumption-based cloud model that allows enterprises to purchase network services, infrastructure, or management from a provider. In a multi-cloud environment, NaaS enables organisations to unify networking resources across public clouds, private data centres, and communications infrastructure, operating them as a single network.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

IaC leverages code to provision and manage infrastructure and resources, replacing manual tasks with programmable configurations. Integrating multi-cloud networking with IaC allows coding multi-cloud networking capabilities directly into applications during development, enabling automated deployment and management.

Software Overlays

Software overlays provide segmentation and granular control features, which are highly desired in multi-cloud environments. Multi-cloud networking leverages overlays to enhance management capabilities, security, segmentation, and control within a single platform, enabling better governance across different cloud environments.

Implementing multi-cloud architecture

Multi-cloud architecture refers to an approach to IT infrastructure that includes numerous public or private clouds or a combination of public and private clouds and on-premises technology. It enables businesses to deliberately divide important workloads, apps, and data across various cloud service providers (CSPs).

Here is a step-by-step guide on implementing a multi-cloud architecture in your organisation:

• Define goals: This involves reviewing the existing infrastructure, applications, and workload requirements and identifying specific use cases that a multi-cloud environment can support, such as enabling real-time data sharing across different geographies.
• Select cloud service providers: Carefully evaluate and choose cloud service providers based on their unique features, services, and capabilities that best meet your business needs. Consider factors like performance, analytics, service contracts, and costs during the selection process, and involve relevant stakeholders like IT teams to leverage their expertise during cloud migration.
• Integrate compliance and regulations: Adhere to industry-specific regulations and standards across different jurisdictions by integrating compliance rules throughout the multi-cloud lifecycle. Also, utilise compliance tools offered by cloud service providers that can automate updates to align with evolving regulatory requirements.
• Adopt FinOps for cost optimisation: Implement FinOps practices and leverage AI-powered cost management tools to optimise cloud costs, maximise business value, and increase application performance in the multi-cloud environment.
• Continuously refine strategy: Regularly reassess business goals, review cloud service portfolios, and evaluate evolving technologies to maintain agility, foster innovation, and ensure multi-cloud optimisation.

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Security and compliance in multi-cloud environment

While multi-cloud environments can provide greater flexibility and cost savings, they also introduce new security and compliance problems. This is because several vendors and clouds are involved, increasing the possibility of a cyberattack. However, these issues can be overcome by adhering to best security practices for multi-cloud deployment, such as:

• Manage cloud security services: Several cloud service providers have built-in security features, including encryption, access control, and network security. Monitoring and managing these services is critical to ensuring that they are properly set up and performing as intended. Also, logging user and system activity and network traffic across all cloud environments can help with multi-cloud optimisation.

• Implement access control: Proper access control ensures that only authorised users and applications can access cloud resources. This includes strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, and role-based access control. Identity management tools can be used to ensure that identities are properly authenticated across all clouds.

• Perform vulnerability assessment: Conduct regular audits and assessments, including penetration testing to identify vulnerabilities and weak-points in the organisation's security posture. This proactive approach helps teams address security issues before threat actors and cybercriminals can exploit them.

• Use data encryption: Encrypting data, both in transit and at rest, is crucial for protecting sensitive information from unauthorised access in multi-cloud environments. Strong encryption algorithms and keys must be used, and the encryption process must be managed securely.

Monitoring and management of multi-cloud environment

Multi-cloud monitoring is the continuous, real-time observation of the performance and condition of applications, services, and supporting resources deployed across multiple cloud providers. This practice is essential for businesses leveraging a combination of public and private clouds.

An effective multi-cloud monitoring strategy helps ensure seamless system operation, optimises resource utilisation, maintains security posture, and facilitates compliance with specific regulations and standards. Now that you understand the benefits of multi-cloud monitoring, here are ways to effectively manage a multi-cloud environment:

• Enable data and application portability: Cross-cloud data sharing technologies enable seamless data movement and sharing between public clouds, addressing these challenges. 

• Aggregate and centralise data: To extract valuable insights, enterprises should aggregate and centralise data from multiple clouds into a single data lake, database, or cloud data platform. This allows for secure storage, combined analysis, and data-driven decision-making across the entire multi-cloud environment.

• Optimise data retention: Establish data retention policies based on legal/regulatory compliance requirements and operational needs, ensuring critical data is securely and cost-effectively stored for the appropriate duration. Also, centralising data in cloud storage and indexing it with a data lake database can enable unlimited cost-effective data retention.

• Leverage multi-cloud disaster recovery: Implement a multi-cloud disaster recovery strategy, enabling data and application recovery from one public cloud to another in case of an unplanned outage or service disruption. This approach bypasses the limitations of single-cloud, cross-region disaster recovery setups and reduces the risk of unacceptable data loss while leveraging application portability.

Conclusion

Effective multi-cloud governance is essential for organisations to maintain compliance, optimise resources, and reduce costs across diverse cloud platforms. By standardising policies, centralising visibility, and leveraging automation, businesses can manage their cloud infrastructure more efficiently. Tata Communications' hybrid multi-cloud services offer a powerful solution to streamline governance, providing a single pane of glass for managing and securing your multi-cloud environment. Enhance your cloud strategy with a comprehensive and scalable approach to multi-cloud governance. For consistent performance, security, and compliance across all your cloud platforms, request a free live demo.