Multicloud Strategy: Pros, Cons, and Tips for Success

What Is a Multicloud Strategy? 

A multicloud strategy involves using multiple cloud services from different providers to host services and infrastructure. By distributing resources across various clouds, businesses can optimize performance, reduce costs, and meet compliance or data sovereignty requirements. This approach enables flexibility in selecting services that best meet specific needs or achieve optimal performance for certain tasks.

Adopting a multicloud strategy allows organizations to avoid vendor lock-in and enhance business continuity planning. Businesses can mitigate risks associated with outages or service disruptions by not relying on a single cloud provider. Additionally, this strategy provides the leverage necessary to negotiate better service terms due to competition among providers.

In this article:

• Multicloud Adoption: Statistics and Trends
• Multicloud Computing vs. Hybrid Cloud Computing
• Pros of a Multicloud Strategy 
• Cons of a Multicloud Strategy
• Tips for Building a Successful Multicloud Strategy

Multicloud Adoption: Statistics and Trends

The cloud computing market is estimated at $1 trillion globally. According to the Wall Street Journal, 89% of organizations have embraced a multicloud architecture, and 25% use at least five clouds. Recent market analyses suggest that the shift towards multicloud environments is driven by the need for greater flexibility, improved disaster recovery, and optimized costs. 

According to Deloitte, the move to ubiquitous and heterogeneous computing is another significant trend. This means organizations will consider all technology platforms available and run workloads and the data where most appropriate. This includes the multicloud trend, but it looks broader to include a full mix of systems that can be used for any business purpose. The concept of “multicloud” could expand to include mobile computing platforms, traditional computing systems in enterprise data centers, and edge computing systems.

Multicloud Computing vs. Hybrid Cloud Computing 

Multicloud computing involves using cloud services from multiple providers, unlike hybrid cloud computing, which combines private and public cloud services from the same or different providers. The primary difference is in the architecture and purpose: Multicloud focuses on leveraging the best services from multiple providers, while hybrid cloud aims to create a seamless blend of on-premises and cloud resources.

Hybrid cloud computing offers the advantage of keeping sensitive data on-premises while utilizing the cloud for scalable resources. However, a multicloud approach offers greater flexibility in service selection and avoids vendor lock-in by utilizing services from multiple cloud providers, potentially leading to better performance and cost efficiencies.

Pros of a Multicloud Strategy 

1. Agility and Choice

A multicloud strategy enhances agility, allowing businesses to deploy and scale applications rapidly across different cloud environments. This flexibility ensures that workloads are always matched with the best-fit infrastructure, optimizing performance and resource utilization. Additionally, the freedom to choose among providers enables organizations to select services that precisely meet their requirements.

The greater level of choice in a multicloud strategy empowers businesses to optimize their IT environments as their needs change continuously and as new technologies emerge. By not being tied to a single vendor, companies can easily adopt new services that offer competitive advantages, ensuring that their IT infrastructure remains cutting-edge.

2. Utilize Best-of-Breed Services

Organizations can utilize the best-of-breed services from various providers by employing a multicloud strategy. This means they can select the most efficient, innovative, and cost-effective services specific to their needs. For example, they might choose one cloud for its superior AI and machine learning capabilities and another for its robust data storage options.

This approach enables businesses to harness each provider’s strengths, optimizing their technology stack for maximum performance and efficiency. It encourages leveraging each cloud’s unique offerings, rather than settling for a one-size-fits-all solution.

3. Price Leverage

A multicloud strategy enhances an organization’s negotiating power with cloud service providers. With the flexibility to switch services, businesses are more likely to negotiate terms and prices. Providers, aware of the competition, may offer better deals to retain or win business.

This market competition drives down costs, allowing organizations to optimize their cloud spend. The capability to migrate services or workloads to different clouds in response to pricing changes or to leverage cost-effective services allows for dynamic cost management and operational efficiency.

4. Compliance and Data Sovereignty

Adopting a multicloud strategy significantly enhances an organization’s ability to comply with regulatory requirements and manage data sovereignty issues. With data regulations becoming increasingly stringent and varied across regions, a multicloud approach allows businesses to store and process data in specific locations that comply with local laws and regulations. 

A multicloud environment also facilitates adherence to industry-specific regulations by enabling organizations to choose cloud providers that offer compliance certifications and tools tailored to specific sectors, such as healthcare, finance, or government.

Cons of a Multicloud Strategy 

1. Complexity and Management

Managing multiple cloud environments introduces complexity. Businesses must navigate different tools, interfaces, and management practices for each provider. This diversity can strain IT teams, requiring new skills and resulting in operational inefficiencies if not properly managed.

Tracking costs and usage across several clouds is challenging. Without a unified monitoring and management strategy, organizations risk overspending or underutilizing resources, negating some of the strategy’s cost benefits.

Learn more in our detailed guide to multicloud management (coming soon)

2. Interoperability and Integration

Interoperability and integration are major challenges in multicloud strategies. Ensuring that applications and data can move seamlessly between cloud environments requires careful planning. Without interoperability, workloads could become siloed in one environment, reducing flexibility.

Integration complexities arise from differing cloud APIs, services, and data formats. Businesses must invest in middleware or adopt containerization strategies to bridge these differences and ensure smooth operations across cloud environments.

3. Security and Governance

Security and governance in a multicloud strategy raise specific concerns. Each cloud provider has its own security protocols, compliance standards, and shared responsibility model, potentially creating inconsistencies in an organization’s security posture. Ensuring uniform security policies across multiple clouds is challenging but critical to mitigate risks.

Moreover, data sovereignty and privacy regulations complicate governance in global operations. Businesses must navigate the varied compliance requirements of each cloud service and jurisdiction, requiring a comprehensive understanding of legal and regulatory landscapes.

Tips for Building a Successful Multicloud Strategy

Create a Single Pane of Glass

To manage the complexity of multicloud environments, organizations should aim to create a single pane of glass—a unified management platform. This allows for centralized monitoring and management of all cloud services, improving visibility and control. Simplifying complexity through a unified dashboard enables efficient operations and better decision-making.

A single pane of glass facilitates real-time analytics and reporting across clouds, aiding in proactive management and optimization. It also supports better job scheduling, resource allocation, and compliance tracking, centralizing critical operational aspects.

Leverage Automation

Automated tools are essential for managing multicloud environments efficiently. They help standardize deployments, scaling, and operations across different clouds. Automation reduces manual tasks, minimizing errors and freeing up teams to focus on strategic initiatives.

Additionally, automation enables consistent policy enforcement, ensuring security and compliance across cloud environments. By using tools to automate processes, businesses can achieve agility, accelerate time-to-market, and maintain operational consistency.

Build a Zero-trust Security Approach

A zero-trust security approach ensures stringent authentication and authorization for users and devices across all cloud environments. This model assumes that no entity within or outside the network is trusted, requiring verification at every access attempt.

It significantly reduces the attack surface and enhances overall security posture.

Implementing zero-trust in a multicloud strategy involves granular policy enforcement, continuous monitoring, and micro-segmentation. This approach ensures that even if one cloud is compromised, the breach’s impact is contained.

Adopt FinOps for Cost Optimization

FinOps, or cloud financial management, is vital for optimizing costs in a multicloud strategy. It involves bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud services, allowing businesses to balance speed, cost, and quality. Implementing FinOps requires cross-functional teams to work collaboratively, ensuring cost-effective decisions.

Key practices include establishing a central cost management team, employing showback and chargeback mechanisms, and leveraging cost optimization tools. Adopting FinOps enables real-time decision-making based on cost analysis, driving financial accountability and efficiency in multicloud environments.

Anodot: AI-Based Cloud Management Solves Multicloud Challenges

Leveraging the advantages of AI, advanced cloud management solutions for multicloud deployments are a scalable and flexible method to mitigate the challenges companies face when migrating to multicloud deployments. 

Anodot is a multicloud management platform that provides:

Management of Cloud, Business and Revenue Metrics

Advanced AI Monitoring solutions can provide insights into the metrics of end-to-end operations. Simply, you can monitor your operations according to goals and costs.

With numerous metrics in place, an AI-driven cloud management solution can analyze all relevant data to provide a true picture of cloud costs. 

Correlation of Metrics and Costs

Specialized algorithms correlate metrics with costs. By monitoring your cloud metrics and your revenue and business metrics — you can understand the true unit economics of your SaaS customers, features, engineering teams, and more.

Real-Time Anomaly Detection and Cost Alerts

Suppose the system is not functioning properly or the cost of a particular activity is beyond the optimum amount. In that case, the system administrator will receive immediate alerts and can take the necessary steps to correct the situation.

This provides value in two important ways: First, detecting operational anomalies can prevent costly downtime, and second, it keeps costs in check.

AI and ML Forecast Cloud Resource Usage

Advanced monitoring solutions provided by Anodot come with embedded AI and ML features. These can be leveraged to make predictions and forecast the usage of cloud resources across multiple vendors and geographic locations according to seasonal demand. In this way, Cloud administrators can prepare themselves for the additional load they may face at any given time.

Visualization of End-to-End Cloud Operations

The visibility of all data in real-time is an incredible advantage for solving many challenges in multicloud management. Anodot’s AI-based cloud management solution provides a complete visual of cloud operations, making it clear to administrators how to optimize cloud resources according to business requirements and budgetary constraints.

Implementing Anodot’s cloud cost management solution has significant benefits for administrators, including:  

•     Full control over multicloud costs
•     Granular visibility into operations
•     Correlation and insight on key cloud and business metrics
•     Constant infrastructure optimization

Learn more about Anodot’s AI-based cloud cost management solution