Cloud computing
Multicloud: what it is, what are the benefits and use cases
Organizations engaged in their digital transformation journey are rethinking their strategy to define an IT infrastructure truly designed to run all workloads in the most secure and high-performance manner.
Traditional IT environments, such as the on-premise data center, public cloud and private cloud, are taking on a heterogeneous valence and should no longer be understood as one-piece architectures, but as the reasoned composition of many services that can result from the offerings of multiple cloud service providers.
To ensure an adequate level of efficiency in the implementation of cloud service offerings, it is therefore appropriate to develop a strategic approach based on the multicloud, capable of generating real added value in the IT infrastructure by identifying and implementing in the enterprise pipeline the best performing, innovative and cost-effective solutions among those available on the market.
What is multicloud
Multicloud generically refers to the simultaneous use of at least two services offered by different cloud providers, regardless of whether they are public or private clouds.
It is therefore a term that refers to the IT strategy that organizations tend to adopt in order to search the market for the best solutions to meet the workloads of all their lines of business, selecting the most effective and convenient ones from the catalog of all providers active on the market.
In fact, a proper strategic approach to multicloud does not contemplate a simple and indistinct addition of multiple services, but a reasoned selection that allows on the one hand to actually find the most suitable solutions to satisfy one’s workloads, and on the other hand to develop a vision that is both agile and synergistic, thus averting the dangerous lock-ins that happen when one relies on a single cloud ecosystem, without, however, compromising on performance.
Defining a multicloud strategy is therefore a priority factor in information technology-related activities, especially considering the incredible variety of horizontal and vertical solutions currently available, even considering topics such as data sovereignty and the growing prevalence of so-called second-generation clouds (next generation clouds).
The advantages
A proper and informed multicloud strategy enables organizations to achieve significant IT benefits.
Agility
Executing an IT strategy based on the multicloud approach enables companies to meet the needs of lines of business by overcoming the limitations of legacy infrastructure, modernizing their applications, and taking advantage of the proverbial scalability of cloud services to increase or decrease available resources according to the actual demands of the workloads to be executed.
Cloud migration
A reasoned multicloud strategy enables organizations to plan and execute with a high level of control the migration of their applications from legacy to cloud environments, progressively modernizing the entire enterprise portfolio by choosing the services in the market that are most instrumental in achieving this goal.
Redundancy and failover
Using the same services on the infrastructures of different cloud providers allows for the redundancy that is essential to guard against any possible service disruption.
In the event of a failure, organizations can failover workloads to another cloud provider to ensure business continuity and full restoration of the original configuration under completely secure conditions.
Choosing the most efficient and cost-effective services on the market
With the variety of offerings in the cloud market, organizations can choose the solutions that best meet their needs, both technologically and in terms of cost-effectiveness aspects.
Security
Cloud platforms implement and deliver their services by taking a zero-trust approach, greatly facilitating organizations in their cloud adoption.
In each case, cloud security redefines the concept of accountability.
Ensuring a secure infrastructure at the hardware-software level is one of the obligations incumbent on the cloud provider, but corporate customers still remain responsible for how they use and share the data that is uploaded to the cloud.
Governance and innovation
With multicloud orchestration platforms, it is possible to automate the management and governance of adopted services to achieve a high level of visibility, which is essential for enterprise IT to monitor technological and economic aspects related to workloads.
Automation saves significant resources at the IT level, which can be allocated in the search for innovative solutions at the service and product level to renew and make the enterprise offering more competitive.
Reduction of lock-in risk
The ability to use multiple cloud providers enables the avoidance of lock-in with a single cloud ecosystem, avoiding being locked into unaffordable solutions should a provider choose to vary technological or economic conditions from those in place at the time of service subscription.
The multicloud architecture
In the context of cloud computing, architecture refers to the combination of the technological components that make up a cloud environment, which generally consist of a pool of virtualized, network-shared resources.
In the multicloud environment, this concept does not vary, except for the added element of complexity given by the presence of multiple public and private cloud services to manage, the number and variety of which implies the adoption of specific platforms capable of automating overall management.
Modern solutions enable a self-service approach while being consistent with regard to strict control of regulations, policies and financial parameters defined by the organization.
Cloud architects must therefore analyze business needs and translate them into a practical strategy, keeping in mind that the two reference architectural models that need the most management requirements are IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service).
In the case of IaaS, companies use the remote services of a third-party provider to avoid the purchase, configuration, and maintenance of servers, networks, and storage at their data center, yet manage the software interface and applications entirely.
This is the model that allows the greatest level of control, for the greatest IT effort.
Organizations can use multiple IaaS from different cloud providers and collectively combine the available stacks to run their workloads.
In the case of PaaS, we refer to the virtualized development environments that developers use to manage the entire lifecycle of their applications, which are themselves based on microservice architectures, whose functional components are technology independent and can run independently on virtual machine instances and containers offered by different providers.
These technologies in turn have special orchestration platforms, such as Kubernetes.
Regardless of the architecture, cloud architects guide their choices according to certain generalizable factors, such as:
- The ability to manage applications consistently and functionally, regardless of their deployment across different services
- The ability to manage applications across public clouds without having to rewrite them
- Zero-trust security and use of models such as DevSecOps regardless of application deployment
- Presence of tools and technologies that can facilitate automation for legacy application migration, avoiding heavy refactoring.
Multicloud vs hybrid cloud
Generally speaking, there is some widespread inconsistency when it comes to multicloud and hybrid cloud, to the point that the two definitions often end up being used as synonyms, often quite improperly, as they refer to totally different concepts and approaches in IT.
Multicloud refers to the deployment of multiple clouds of the same type, offered by different providers, regardless of whether they work together, while hybrid cloud considers clouds of different types orchestrated and integrated to work together.
An example often cited when it comes to explaining the concept of hybrid cloud is the analogy with the hybrid engine in cars, consisting of an electric component and a thermal component, equivalent to clouds of different types designed to work together.
In the case of multicloud, services are selected from separate cloud environments, for even very different purposes, without the need to connect them together.
This motivates because multiple public cloud services or multiple private cloud services are adopted, without any hybridization taking place between the parts.
The fact that via or without interconnection between clouds makes hybrid cloud and multicloud somehow mutually exclusive approaches.
The former model is definitely the most popular when it comes to integrating existing systems, while in the case of multicloud the choice is mainly addressed when the overall goal is to improve security, availability and performance through the use of environments offered by different cloud providers.
Use cases
Companies frequently implement multicloud IT strategies when it comes to:
- Avoid dependence on a single vendor, in favor of corporate sovereignty in controlling its IT infrastructure
- Accelerate cloud transformation paths, especially with a view to moving from a first-generation cloud-first logic to a more advanced and efficient cloud-smart approach
- Support hybrid work and DevOps teams, which involve technology independence and agility in choosing which technologies to use, to do essentially the same things differently, with guaranteed 24/7 availability
- Encourage the adoption of the so-called second-generation cloud, based on data centers that can offer public cloud services in close proximity to the organization, to achieve lower latency levels in applications and meet requirements related to current data sovereignty regulations.
- Fostering the adoption of edge architectures to deploy applications in various domains, such as manufacturing, logistics and retail, that require processing capacity close to devices and interactions with end users.
The challenges of multicloud
In the face of obvious advantages, the multicloud approach brings with it a number of critical issues that must be overcome through extensive knowledge of business needs and a proven track record of managing cloud architectures.
Management complexity
The continuous deployment of services offered by different cloud providers makes the orchestration of distributed workloads complex, especially thinking in terms of the entire application lifecycle.
Risk of inefficiency and high costs
Inadequate visibility could result in unnecessary active services, unnecessary duplication, and other inefficiencies that can have negative economic repercussions as far as cloud management is concerned.
Data silo risk
If the lines of business do not operate synergistically, the risk is to use cloud services as a simple addition between them, without taking advantage of most of their benefits, generating additional data silos on top of those insisting on traditional on-premise services.
Information security
The discontinuity between the various services deployed and the technological variety that characterizes them increases the risks of vulnerabilities that cyber criminals could exploit to their advantage.
The multicloud means a natural increase in the potential attack surface, so it requires dedicated cybersecurity measures, the monitoring of which involves tools integrated with the service management and orchestration platforms implemented by companies.
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