Multi-cloud Architecture: What Is The Best Strategy to Implement?

If you are considering implementing multi-cloud architecture as a part of your regular IT system integration services, now is probably the best time to do it. According to Exploding Topics research, 89% of companies around the world have already done this. Indeed, along with main benefits of migrating to cloud, such as almost unlimited scalability, access to innovative technology stacks, and introduction of cutting-edge security and fault tolerance measures, this type of architecture may open up additional opportunities for cost reduction and process optimization. Let’s discuss below what a multi-cloud strategy is, what are its benefits and drawbacks, as well as how to implement it in general.

This structure significantly reduces technical risks and increases the flexibility of the company operations. In particular, multi-cloud architecture can be used both for infrastructure backup, CDN, data storing, and computing.

Some Stats About Multi-cloud

Let’s just take a look at last year’s statistics:

• 92% of large companies have adopted multi-cloud architecture
• 73% of IT decision-makers claim multi-cloud helps them achieve their business goals

But can we only consider multi-cloud as a life changer for growing companies? In fact, there’s another fairly popular cloud architecture—hybrid. Let’s find out below what is the difference between them.

What is the Difference Between Multi-cloud and Hybrid Cloud?

There are two related concepts: hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. But how do they differ?

Hybrid cloud architecture is a combination of two or more different clouds from one cloud provider with at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud. Typically, this deployment model is needed to host internal company resources in the private cloud and use external cloud services in the public one.

Regarding multi-cloud strategy, the presence of a private cloud is optional. However, it’s important that the public clouds that it includes refer to different cloud platforms. This deployment model provides the optimization of the price/quality ratio of cloud services available on the market, as well as extensive opportunities for implementing fault tolerance and disaster recovery scenarios.

Advantages of Multi-cloud Strategy

Next, let’s find out about the benefits that businesses can gain using multi-cloud architectures.

Flexibility

The flexibility provided by a multi-cloud architecture greatly expands the one we’re used to in the context of the standalone models of cloud deployment. The fact is that now companies have no restrictions on access to an advanced technology stack, computing power, security, and other top services and characteristics of existing cloud platforms. They can make the best combination of what is available for the public cloud and stitch it together with unified IT infrastructure, because now they have no fixation on a specific vendor.

Access to Best-in-Class Services

Why limit yourself to the capabilities of just one cloud vendor when there are many? Indeed, multi-cloud infrastructures open up vast opportunities to access best-in-class cloud services that are second to none. Examples of these services include databases, messaging systems, CDNs, and AI/ML services.

Easier Introduction of Innovations

Each cloud platform has its own strengths. To expand their list of services and, in turn, attract and retain customers, these platforms regularly introduce top technologysolutions and innovations. Thus, by choosing a multi-cloud strategy, you open access to the most successful, cost-effective, and innovative solutions than would be the case with only one vendor.

Best Price/Quality Ratio

By choosing a single cloud service provider for cost benefits, you can significantly lose the quality of some services that you have to use. In turn, the variability of multi-cloud solutions provides an optimal balance between quality and overhead.

Risk Reduction

And, of course, let’s remember that an equally important goal of implementing a multi-cloud strategy is to ensure increased fault tolerance of the company’s digital infrastructure. While the servers of one cloud platform may be idle for some reason, the multi-cloud will automatically transfer the workload to another cloud and thereby save your company’s infrastructure workflows from interruptions.

Disadvantages of Multi-cloud Strategy

Even armed with the support of experienced professionals who will help you get the most out of what cloud vendors offer, you’ll also encounter the disadvantages of multi-cloud strategies. Let’s talk about them below.

Increased Architecture Complexity

Due to being tied to several cloud platforms, the company’s digital infrastructure becomes more branched and acquires more dependencies. This complicates building, scaling, and optimization.

Complex Management

Compared to standalone cloud deployment models, multi-cloud always has a more sophisticated architecture. Therefore, it implies more complex management procedures that would take into account the behavior of the network infrastructure when switching from one cloud platform to another.

Problems with Finding Personnel with New Skills

Multi-cloud management requires deeper expertise from your personnel, so you’ll need to put in a lot of effort to train your own IT department or hire top experts and onboard them. If the time and resources required for learning aren’t in your favor, this can be a serious reason against this architecture.

Harder Splitting Loads 

The team that will migrate your IT infrastructure to the multi-cloud will need to pay special attention to the distribution of the workload of applications and services. 

In particular, spreading workloads across multiple cloud platforms is difficult because you need to use platform-independent monitoring, surveillance, security, billing, and engineering tools. Therefore, you will most likely have to spend time on custom development to tie these platforms together, or purchase third-party ready-made solutions. This automatically increases the cost of building and maintaining such an infrastructure.

Security Gaps

When the same application or service moves from one cloud to another at some stage of its operation, it can be subject to different vendor-specific security policies. Ultimately, this creates additional vulnerabilities that are sometimes impossible to prevent or eliminate completely.

When Companies Need to Implement a Multi-cloud Strategy

Now we’ll discuss transforming the benefits of multi-cloud strategy described in the previous paragraphs into real use cases so you could decide whether you need this solution or not.

You Want to Avoid Vendor Lock-in 

Vendor lock-in is determined by the complexity of migrating some or all of the services and/or applications within a single company’s IT infrastructure to the cloud of a new provider or to local server facilities. This happens when companies use unique high-level features in their development processes. In turn, the initial basement of your processes on the multi-cloud according to the cloud native architecture principles often implies the implementation of a native cloud architecture and, thus, excludes vendor lock-in a priori. 

You Have Constraints Associated with Data Gravity

Data-rich systems regularly pull in more and more new data. In turn, this data is gradually beginning to require new applications and services. This phenomenon is called “data gravity,” which means reducing the barriers between data storages and the services/applications for acceptable latency and better throughput.

As data and related services and applications accumulate, companies can come to a situation in which such IT infrastructure becomes difficult (or even impossible) to transfer to new environments. 

As for multi-cloud, this architecture allows companies to initially create a cloud-first infrastructure that is well adapted for such scaling. At the same time, the lack of binding to a specific cloud platform provides the desired portability.

Your Apps and Services’ Performance Needs to be Optimized Individually

If your applications and services are spread across multiple, widely separated regions, leveraging a single cloud model can result in performance degradation. 

At the same time, the implementation of multi-cloud strategies opens up the ability to select data centers located in different geographic regions, ensuring high-speed processing of user requests around the globe.

Regulatory Requirements for Your Applications and Services Depend on The Location Where They Are Deployed

In addition to the performance limitations of the single cloud models, you may also need to follow different regulatory requirements for user data security by region. This is easily achieved through a multi-cloud strategy and, in particular, the ability of different cloud services to comply with the standards of a specific region.

You Worry About Consistency of Tech Solutions Across All Departments and Offices of Your Company

Due to the size of your company, the adoption of new technologies needed to optimize workflows may be too slow. Thus, at some point, employees in your remote offices may start using some software tools and solutions locally, which opens up new security risks that you may not even be aware of.

If you decide to implement a multi-cloud strategy, these changes can happen in sync and inextricably with all your departments. Thus, you get comprehensive control over the security of your digital infrastructure, regardless of its scale.

You Need the Best Fault Tolerance and Most Efficient Disaster Recovery for Your Digital Workflows

Despite popular cloud services guarantee 99.5% uptime for their services, companies can still face unexpected downtime, which in turn entails both additional costs and loss of reputation. Regarding multi-cloud architectures, this model implies automatic transfer of workloads to the capacities of another cloud if servers of the default one fail for some reason.

You Need to Optimize Cloud Expenses

We’ve already talked about the enormous potential for cost reduction that a multi-cloud technology opens up. Indeed, with multi-cloud, the opportunity to choose the most suitable pricing model for your specific case has become wider and more flexible.

When It’s Not An Option

Along with all of the above benefits of multi-cloud strategy, we’d like to remind you that it isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Below we’ll consider cases in which it wouldn’t be the best solution for specific business needs.

Cost Reduction Is Uncertain

One of the main goals of a multi-cloud strategy is to reduce the costs that can accompany you when you’re fixated on only one provider. On the other hand, if you don’t fully understand whether this goal is achievable in the case of a multi-cloud, you should think about whether you need to implement it at all. The fact is that in some cases, the savings are negligible in relation to the additional costs associated with the introduction and complication of the management processes of sophisticated infrastructure.

You Lack the DevOps Personnel

You should also analyze whether your current tech personnel is capable of effectively managing multi-cloud maintenance tasks. The fact is that even if your team knows how to work with certain cloud platforms, multi-cloud also assumes the presence of individual skills for the successful functioning of the entire system. Therefore, you’ll either have to hire new in-house experts, or improve the skills of existing personnel, which can be time-consuming, expensive, and not effective enough. On the other hand, you can avoid all these risks by hiring an outsourcing team like us.

You Plan to Implement Native Tools 

At a basic level, all cloud providers have approximately the same package of services. But, when it comes to their native tools, such as AWS machine learning in the case of AWS, they are unique, and moving an application from one cloud to another (for example, for load balancing) won’t be possible. Thus, if your multi-cloud strategy cannot get around these obstacles, it’s better not to use it at all.

What Are The Key Success Factors for a Multi-cloud Strategy? 

Finally, we propose you check seven essential steps to the successful implementation of a multi-cloud technology.

Ensure Consistency in Performance, Resiliency, and Security Policies 

Instead of creating a unique set of policies for each cloud and thereby increasing the risk of non-compliance, you’ll need to provide a holistic approach. This can be achieved through:

• Consistency of protocols and formats for data storage and processing operations
• Implementation of unified access and control policies
• Creation of a single set of policies for monitoring user actions and identifying network threats
• Formation of a single centralized panel for the administration of these policies, which would include settings for allowed data types, authentication rules, workload distribution protocols, etc.

Resort to Containerization

To make your services and applications portable from cloud to cloud without having to change their program code, you should use containers that can make them run in any environment without impacting their performance or availability. In particular, DevOps tools such as Kubernetes and Docker Swarm may be of use to you.

Develop Scenarios for Transferring Workloads

You must understand that workload distribution planning is a more comprehensive process than following the rule: “If we don’t have enough cloud capacity from one vendor, we’ll transfer the workflows of the service or application to the cloud of another one”. In particular, in addition to this, you must be aware of exactly for what purposes you were originally going to use this or that cloud. This will allow you to avoid duplication of tasks assigned to different cloud providers and, thus, eliminate the need to pay for services that do the same thing.

Choose Multi-cloud Monitoring Tools

Although almost all well-known cloud services have built-in monitoring tools, they are only able to cover a certain perimeter of the tasks within one cloud. Thus, you’ll need a platform that will be able to bring together multiple cloud providers and provide a single control panel for your multi-cloud environment. In particular, we recommend paying attention to Datadog, ScienceLogic, and Zabbix tools.

Provide End-to-End Control over Your Multi-cloud Spending

Multi-cloud environments are quite complex in terms of cost calculation and optimization. Therefore, you’ll need to implement a system that not only automatically calculates the monthly costs for the services of each of the selected cloud vendors but also monitors the volume of use of the services they provide.

Deploy Security Systems Tailored for Multi-cloud Environments

As you open up access to a wide variety of security tools and practices specific to multi-cloud, you also risk exposure to new vulnerabilities not typical to underlying a standalone cloud environment. To minimize these risks, you’ll need to follow the next best practices:

• Build on common security standards (HIPAA, PCI, etc.) when implementing your data protection multi-cloud strategies instead of tailoring your security policies to the capabilities of chosen cloud providers
• Provide continuous monitoring of data stored in logs
• Regularly update cloud-based platforms and tools
• Implement end-to-end encryption when transferring data from one cloud to another
• Refer to DevSecOps practices
• Develop cyber attack response scenarios
• Create separate user access rules for different data types 
• Automate your backup procedures
• Consider disaster recovery scenarios

Automate and Optimize

And, of course, don’t forget to automate as many company processes as possible (for example, administration, application and service deployment, operations scaling, workload migration, threat and outage response, etc.). This can be achieved through the use of proper cloud APIs.

Multi-cloud Strategy: Final Thoughts

We’ve covered the basics of multi-cloud strategies, as well as multi-cloud benefits and drawbacks. Now, we hope this will help you make an informed decision about whether to choose this architecture in your particular case. 

In general, this is a good idea if you don’t want to be tied to a single cloud provider and, at the same time, minimize the risks of downtime in your infrastructure. On the other hand, you must understand that it will be more difficult to manage such an infrastructure, as well as identify weak points in it that need to be optimized. 

Therefore, the final decision on the implementation of the multi-cloud strategy is best made while armed with expert opinion. In particular, you can contact us, and we’ll guide you through the thorny path from the analysis of your existing infrastructure to the post-migration stages. Feel free to write or phone us right now to discuss all aspects of your cloud needs.