INDUSTRY.co.id - Back in the early days of the digital transformation, forward-looking organisations could declare they were using one cloud for their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) needs. But today, more and more companies are adopting a multi-cloud strategy using more than one cloud computing service provider.
The move to a multi-cloud strategy has been largely driven by choices; using more than one cloud service provider allows an organisation to choose whichever services and capabilities fit their needs best.
For a tangible analogy, consider the current cell phone service provider market; there are multiple providers, all of whom claim to offer different benefits. Many families and businesses have more than one cell service provider, to best meet the needs of each user. Similarly, each organisation has a myriad of requirements and certain cloud services meet some of those needs, while other needs can be better met by a different provider. For example, your organisation may employ one cloud for HR applications, while business applications run in another cloud.
While a multi-cloud approach offers numerous benefits, there are some pitfalls to be aware of as well. This post will explore the pros and cons of multi-cloud usage, and the unique security challenges it poses.
Multi-cloud is quickly becoming the standard, with 84% of organisations that use the cloud employing a multi- cloud strategy. Whats more, these businesses are using a combination of four to five public and private clouds on average. In a 2019 Cloud Security Report, 42% of organisations in the survey reported that their primary cloud deployment strategy is multi-cloud.
It is clear that companies of all sizes are now recognising the benefits of moving away from the one- organization, one-cloud approach to one in which their workloads are distributed among multiple cloud service providers. There are a number of reasons for this, which will be discussed below.
Minimising Downtime Reliability and Redundancy Using a multi-cloud strategy can help prevent downtime and disruptions in case of outages. If youre running one cloud and your provider goes down, youre out of luck.
For example, on October 22, 2019, AWS was hit with a DDoS attack that affected S3 services. A significant number of websites on the East Coast of the US were fully or partially down for nearly eight hours the duration of a full business day.
Then in May 2019, a DNS outage impacted a wide range of Microsoft Azure services. Just a handful of time affected services included Azure Active Directory, SharePoint, and OneDrive.
The root cause? A misconfigured DNS update, which left a large portion of users without access to these services for almost two hours. And while these examples are from the biggest cloud vendors, there are many other examples from smaller vendors as well.
Obviously a multi-cloud strategy for all of your applications may not be ideal from an operational and infrastructure costs perspective, but for mission critical applications it is a must. Clearly, relying on one vendor brings inherent risks. Running applications and workloads that require high availability on multiple cloud providers ensures they wont fail if one provider does.
Cloud bursting comes in handy for retailers in high demand shopping seasons or any other businesses that require short bursts of computing power to meet demand without going down. This may allow teams to scale their clouds to match their workloads and keep costs down with highly-discounted services like AWS Spot Instances.
Multi-cloud may sound like the perfect solution for achieving the cloud deployment of your dreams, but it has a number of drawbacks as well. When bringing more than one provider into the mix, there are a number of important issues that should be taken into account.
Cost Planning While using multiple clouds can be more cost-effective since you can pick and choose the services needed from each, this also requires a thorough understanding of the pricing structure and cost per service for each provider. With multiple vendors it can be more challenging to track these expenses and your overall costs. And the pricing structure and cost per service are constantly changing.
Difficulty in Choosing the Right Tools With each provider offering its own set of tools, it can be difficult to determine those that best suit your organisations needs. And one vendors tools dont match those of the other vendors.
