Single cloud dependency is limiting. In today’s fast-paced world, the need to be working 24/7 is more crucial than ever – businesses of any size, operating locally or nationally, across one or many industries, all have to supply round-the-clock services, be “always available,” and operate in real-time. It’s the essential first-premise of business success that has only been made more real by recent large-scale global outages such as Microsoft Azure and AWS.
With the world more connected by the day, single cloud dependency will no longer make the cut. Whether it’s to avoid single vendor lock-in or serious cloud outages, the benefits of having a multi-cloud strategy far outweigh the complexities of achieving successful multi-cloud deployment.
Already, we have the basics for multi-cloud in place. There is now a healthy market of cloud offerings thanks to the multiple hyperscalers, with regulators further encouraging competition amongst them. AWS recently announced that it will allow customers to transfer their data out of its ecosystem to another cloud provider with no fees imposed. Shortly after, Google announced similar plans for data transfer outside of GCP, with Microsoft now expected to lay out an approach for Azure.
These decisions follow provisions set out in the European Data Act which came into force in January, designed to promote competition by allowing cloud customers to switch providers more easily.
While it’s clear big moves are being made by large cloud providers, becoming truly multi-cloud will require bodies such as the CMA or EU in a GDPR-like format to really make a wave in the industry and help remove vendor lock-ins. There are no immediate plans in place, but businesses must make sure they are ready to react quickly to ensure they benefit from the cost and flexibility advantages.
Ensuring Round the Clock Availability is More Important Than Ever
Cloud outages have only highlighted the vulnerability of one cloud deployment. Even the largest cloud hosts – Google, AWS, Microsoft – suffer from outages, and having all your digital eggs in one cloud basket leaves businesses at risk of serious failure.
Concerns about outages shuttering business operations are for good reason, with Oxford Economics calculating that downtime costs Global 2000 companies $400 billion each year, with each hour costing the business an average of $540,000.
The implications are huge. Take the recent CrowdStrike outage, as an example, that affected organizations such as financial services, airlines and operators, and health care organizations that rely on being operational 24/7. It highlighted the general IT dependency today’s businesses have, but if we dig a little deeper, then we see the impact of cloud-specific outages.
Avoid Falling at the First Hurdle
For many, multi-cloud is a plan for the future, with 97% of IT leaders intending to expand their cloud systems further by using one or more clouds in their systems. But currently, too many businesses are preoccupied at the first hurdle – setting up their first cloud deployment. Only when businesses have this first adoption in place do they want to focus on ensuring apps are friendly at multi-cloud deployment level. This is how the risk exposure begins.
In a perfect storm, all clouds would be the same, and shifting masses of information, data and workloads from one cloud provider to another would be a simple endeavor. But the reality is much different. Large-scale organizations have various barriers to overcome when deploying tech stacks across multiple platforms. As explained by Gartner, there are nuances when it comes to features offered by each provider, such as the operating system and programming language etc., and they range from minor to almost complete rewrites of the code.
The next challenge comes with ensuring the applications within the various clouds can “talk” to each other to ensure the seamless exchange of information. The solution lies in the underlying architecture that can seamlessly connect these different cloud providers together and enable the transfer of data-movement in real-time.
Enter the Event Mesh: Ensuring That No Location or Job is Too Big
Between dealing with regulatory compliance changes and avoiding single provider lock-ins, many organizations have had no choice but to rethink their IT infrastructures and adapt to the complications of global operations. Being able to connect data in motion between various clouds and in real-time is a non-negotiable for global enterprises, and it’s where an event mesh can provide the interoperability businesses desperately need.
Within an event mesh, every transaction, business moment or piece of data is an event – no matter where, and no matter what cloud the user is operating on. Businesses using an event-driven architecture have a powerful built-in event mesh which addresses this same challenge of “data in motion” by spanning all clouds and even on-prem locations as one seamless data movement layer.
That means that these businesses can now dynamically shift workloads across clouds by leveraging even relatively small and short-lived differences in separate cloud packaging, pricing and performance advantages. Supported by its global deployment of event brokers within the event mesh, businesses can be confident that their underlying tech stack ensures a multi-region, multi-cloud agnostic approach.
Do the Benefits Outweigh the Costs?
With today’s demanding consumer expectations around responsiveness and availability, the businesses that are the most responsive and available will out-compete the businesses that are not. A multi-cloud approach keeps them agile and available, even when it comes to operating in multiple regions.
For example, some applications will perform better across different clouds, so choose cloud deployments that are suitable for simple data storage versus those suitable for heavy AI-dependent apps. Some, of course, won’t work at all in geographic regions where sovereign data rules may apply. Having a multi-cloud approach will allow organizations to pick and mix according to their business needs, which in turn creates added flexibility for workload placement.
The benefits of multi-cloud go one step further, when trying to ensure best-of -breed cloud deployments for applications. It’s key to remember that although cloud operators all offer services in the cloud, not all services are equal in what they offer. By not locking in with a single vendor, organizations can arbitrage cloud services to get the best service for individual business needs.
It’s Time to Ride the Multi-Cloud Wave!
The significant impacts of IT Cloud outages have only highlighted the urgent need to adopt a multi-cloud strategy. Of course, the journey to multi-cloud deployment isn’t easy, but with the correct enterprise infrastructure in place, such as an event mesh, it just got a whole lot easier.
