Cloud technology is now a crucial part of the enterprise IT strategy. Nearly nine in 10 organisations in Singapore employ cloud-based services, according to Alibaba Cloud’s Cloud in Asia survey conducted in November 2020. Today, a growing phenomenon among businesses is a pick’n’mix approach to deploying cloud solutions – otherwise known as multi-cloud.
Dell Technologies Chairman and CEO Michael Dell declared at the 2021 Dell Technologies Summit that multi-cloud is the “next phase of cloud”. Multi-cloud refers to the implementation and integration of multiple (i.e., two or more) private and public clouds for different application workloads.
This type of IT environment appeals to cloud-savvy enterprises mainly because of the cost savings and flexibility it offers, allowing teams to operate with agility and tailor their cloud services according to business needs. Many also noted that multi-cloud enables reliable disaster recovery, increased data security and compliance and varying performance levels.
The average business uses five different cloud providers. In fact, the 2020 Dell Technologies Digital Transformation Index found that 75% of Singapore organisations had either fully completed or were in the process of making significant investments in multi-cloud.
As more businesses accelerate their move to multi-cloud, they must align the use of cloud technologies with tangible business objectives such as operational efficiencies, ability to innovate and lower costs.
Multi-cloud will allow businesses to play the field and choose cloud platforms based on workload requirements and how well they map to their top business objectives – enabling them to define their multi-cloud strategies in terms of performance and cost-efficiency.
The multi-cloud conundrum
Sometimes, more clouds can lead to more confusion. The adoption of multiple clouds can result in increased complexity, with several cloud providers and solutions within one infrastructure. Data is also becoming more distributed across on-premises and colocation data centres, multiple public clouds, and edge environments. Having more technologies will always be more complex than having just one, and this is no different for multi-cloud.
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An enterprise may claim to have a clear multi-cloud approach in place, but the reality is that many businesses have taken an ad hoc approach to deliver results quickly and at a lower cost – adapting their model to fit their specific needs over time.
While this approach does yield benefits such as increased agility and faster return on investment (ROI), it also breeds several challenges that can mitigate the drivers for adoption over time. For example, poorly managed multi-cloud can harm the speed at which a company can react to security issues.
With the rise of multi-cloud, businesses will be forced to confront complexities. To do so, they need experts to help bring together the appropriate range of IT and services for efficiency optimisation and cost management as the architecture grows. This is where channel partners and technology providers come in.
From complexity to consistency
To navigate the complex multi-cloud landscape, businesses can turn to Managed Service Providers (MSPs) – partners who can provide the expertise, skills and solutions needed to help businesses design a consistent, streamlined approach for multi-cloud implementation.
With the right vendor and channel partner, businesses can minimise the often-associated headaches with the cloud and achieve the promised benefits of scalability and improved spend predictability more quickly.
From a cybersecurity perspective, businesses can lean on MSPs to assist in managing, harnessing, and protecting data in a multi-cloud environment through proactive threat prevention. What’s more, as lowering costs is a critical driver in adopting multi-cloud, businesses must collaborate with their MSPs to ensure any cloud solution put forward is able to meet this need.
The key to success for businesses is striking the right balance of CapEx and OpEx, while also ensuring enough flexibility to scale up with business growth and reduce financial risk should consumption reduce.
More cloud, fewer partners
As enterprise businesses make the move to multi-cloud, more of them are expressing a desire to work with fewer companies when it comes to digital transformation. To do so, businesses can look to MSPs that offer a holistic multi-cloud solution that provides consistent infrastructure and an operating model that simplifies management across private, public, and edge resources.
This way, they can rely on fewer partners to get their complex, sprawling multi-cloud architecture under control. The multi-cloud capabilities must offer customers a consistent experience wherever their applications and data reside. Organisations will need to rely on MSPs to manage, store and protect their data across multiple cloud platforms.
While multi-cloud models offer the flexibility that enterprise businesses need to transform fast, ad hoc deployment strategies will soon begin to undermine these drivers for adoption – if they have not already.
With their extensive IT expertise, MSPs can provide helpful recommendations to customers on the best IT and services to help them tame their current multi-cloud environment. They can also serve as trusted advisors in management and transformation by partnering with vendors to offer more than just software, but also educational and consultancy services.
Businesses must be ready to seize the multi-cloud opportunity today. With the help of a reliable MSP, they can chart out a clear and strategic framework to achieve a unified cloud operating model and efficiently manage resources, minimise business disruption and reduce cybersecurity risk.
