8 Compelling Reasons to Embrace a Multi-Cloud Environment

Posted by Adele Noble on May 10th, 2024

As your organization continues to grow at a rapid pace, handling all of your company's infrastructure and applications on a single cloud platform is becoming increasingly difficult to manage.

You've been hearing more and more about how a multi-cloud strategy could help solve many of the challenges your IT team faces, such as limiting vendor lock-in, improving disaster recovery, and gaining more flexibility and choice.

In this blog post, we will explore 8 compelling reasons why it's time to consider embracing this environment to supercharge your business.

1. Diversify Your Risk and Avoid Downtime With a Multi-Pronged Cloud Presence

Relying on a single cloud service provider exposes your organization to significant risks. What would happen if that cloud provider experienced an outage or security breach that took their services offline?

• Relying on a single cloud vendor leaves you vulnerable if that provider experiences an outage. Even the most reliable companies can face unplanned disruptions due to natural disasters, cyber attacks, hardware failures, and other issues outside of their control. Having your entire business dependent on one cloud means any incident directly impacts your ability to operate.
• With a multi-cloud strategy, you don't put all your eggs in one basket. Should one provider go down, your business can seamlessly failover to running on the other clouds you use. This acts as a safety net, ensuring your operations face minimal interruption even if an outage does occur at your primary cloud.
• You can implement high-availability architectures like load balancing and active/active deployments across clouds. If an application instance or availability zone fails at one provider, traffic can automatically spill over to your other cloud environments, keeping your business online. This achieves a level of reliability above what any single vendor can offer.
• By storing redundant copies of data in multiple clouds, you gain multi-region disaster recovery capabilities. Your data and workloads won't be vulnerable if an entire geographic area faces a catastrophe. With copies safely stored elsewhere, your business can still access critical information even during widespread regional outages.
• Distributing operations across multiple cloud platforms also protects you from vendor-specific security issues or vulnerabilities. Rather than being entirely dependent on one company's security posture, you reduce overall risk by diversifying across clouds. If a provider suffers a breach, your business isn't brought down, and customer data isn't fully compromised.

No vendor is perfect; outages will inevitably happen at some point, even for the most reliable companies. But with a virtualization solutions strategy, you achieve the highest levels of availability by eliminating any single point of failure. Your business can continue functioning smoothly even if one provider faces downtime through your diverse cloud footprint.

2. Gain More Flexibility to Adapt to Changing Needs

Business requirements are constantly evolving. What worked for your infrastructure last year may no longer be the optimal solution as your company and industry undergo transformation. Rather than locking yourself into one cloud vendor's proprietary services and technologies, a multi-cloud gives you far more flexibility to choose the right tools for each new project.

3. Reduce Costs by Leveraging Each Cloud's Strengths and Weaknesses

Every cloud provider has different pricing and capabilities. Rather than paying overage fees or being forced to size your resources generously with one vendor to avoid costs, a this approach lets you strategically place workloads where they will run most cost-efficiently. For example, you could use a larger cloud for high-performance computing needs due to its competitive prices and another cloud to host less resource-intensive services. You may also find that one cloud charges less for storage or data transfers in certain regions. By understanding each vendor's cost model, you can save money long-term.

4. Mitigate Vendor Lock-In Through Increased Interoperability

As cloud platforms race to roll out new services, their proprietary APIs and formats attempt to lock customers into long-term relationships and high switching costs. However, with VMware virtualization, your organization maintains more control and faces less vendor lock-in risk. You can select services based on features rather than vendor allegiance.

5. Improved Disaster Recovery With Geographically-Dispersed Infrastructure

Having all your operations concentrated in one data center location leaves your business vulnerable if that region faces flooding, earthquakes, wildfires or other catastrophic events. However, with applications and data distributed in the clouds and across geographies, if one area goes down, your business can still function. Customers on the other side of the world won't be impacted. A multi-cloud strengthens your disaster recovery posture through geographic redundancy, keeping your organization running even during regional outages.

6. Harness Best-of-Breed Technologies From Multiple Leaders

Rather than limiting your choices to whatever services a single cloud vendor happens to offer, a DAS Storage allows you to build best-of-breed solutions using cutting-edge technologies from different market leaders. For example, you could run databases on Cloud A, which has the most advanced data services, host applications on Cloud B, which offers powerful serverless computing, and leverage Cloud C's top-notch AI and ML capabilities. By cherry-picking each provider's strengths, you create a cohesive architecture optimized around your specific needs rather than a vendor's portfolio.

7. Gain a Competitive Edge Through Faster Innovation

With infrastructure and platforms spanning multiple leading clouds, your organization has access to the latest innovations far quicker than competitors relying on just one vendor. You can experiment with new services from different providers, try emerging technologies, and scale winners rapidly. You identify valuable technologies faster and integrate them into your products before others even learn about them, driving competitive differentiation.

8. Reduce Vendor Lock-In of Specialized Workloads

Some workloads, like SAP applications, require expensive proprietary databases or have custom code deeply integrated with a specific vendor's APIs. With a multi-cloud, you avoid locking such specialized workloads into a single vendor's ecosystem. Plus, distributing specialized workloads across clouds also increases availability—if one cloud faces issues, your business can still run on alternate platforms.

Summing It Up

A multi-cloud provides numerous advantages over relying on a sole provider. As your business grows rapidly, an open, distributed approach to the cloud spanning multiple leading platforms will help you innovate faster, operate more cost-efficiently, and scale securely to support your organization's ambitious goals. It's time to start embracing the powerful advantages a multi-environment offers your IT operations and bottom line.