How to Make Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud Environment More Effective?

Today, almost every company across diverse industries leverage some kind of cloud infrastructure for efficient business. Cloud computing now has become mainstream as most organizations' IT ecosystems adopt public and private cloud, alongside traditional IT practices. Moreover, many businesses also believe the hybrid cloud environment will assist them in addressing the challenges of these distinct infrastructures.

As a wide array of cloud offerings available in the market, companies are often left besieged with conflicting pressures, ranging from cost management and security to vendor lock-in concerns. However, easing these challenges requires a grave step that several organizations are investing in when they plan for cloud adoption and that is a robust cloud governance model based on a wary assessment of long-term needs.

Many businesses around the world are now realizing the importance of a multi-cloud strategy, and its demand is increasing rapidly. In a 2017 State of the SaaS-Powered Workplace report, companies use an average of 16 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps, where 73 percent of businesses believed over 80 percent of their apps will be SaaS by 2020.

Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud

The hybrid cloud environment is a combination of public cloud, private cloud, and traditional on-premises infrastructure. This infrastructure provides businesses greater flexibility and more data deployment options by enabling workloads to shift between private and public clouds as computing needs and costs change.

On the other hand, multi-cloud consists of multiple cloud computing and storage services in a single network architecture. With typical multi-cloud services using two or more public clouds and private clouds alike, a multi-cloud environment intends to eliminate the dependency on any single cloud provider or instance. This infrastructure occurs when organizations have various private cloud platforms or vendors within their private cloud environments.

Building Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Strategies

With the evolution of digital technologies, enterprises increasingly seek to capitalize on the flexibility and choice of multiple cloud offerings to leverage the best cloud services while gaining reasonable cost reduction benefits. As organizations are progressively heading towards digital transformation, the adoption of cloud services, whether it is public or private, will increase at a breakneck speed.

It is also said that the adoption of multi-cloud will also gain pace and over 85 percent of enterprise IT corporations will invest in multi-cloud architecture by 2020. 

Multi-cloud approach is particularly effective if businesses are dealing with such challenges, including users are not located near any data center, or widely distributed geographically; facing regulations limit in specific countries for storing data; environment where public clouds are utilized with on-premises resources; cloud-based application is not resilient that can affect disaster recovery when loss of a single data center.

Moreover, adopting the hybrid cloud can provide businesses with the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. The evolution of this infrastructure is based on convenience, increased inexpensive services, and the flexibility of using different clouds with diverse tools. This cloud strategy offers the best of public and private cloud services. Enterprises can determine which aspects of their business they want in each environment, enabling them to take advantage of all the benefits.

Thus, when making use of a hybrid and multi-cloud environment, businesses must manage infrastructure and capacity growth like a traditional data center. Leveraging policies for pre-defined instance sizes will best operate the resources available in the cloud. Having the right-size hybrid and multi-cloud will also save money enterprises always seek to pour in storage capacity.