Multi-cloud ! What is it? | Nkosinathi Sola

The multi-cloud cloud computing model leverages two or more cloud platforms. Instead of relying on a single cloud provider, the multi-cloud strategy relies on different cloud providers to take advantage of the various cloud services those providers offer. Multi-cloud can refer to combinations of software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS) models. Commonly used cloud providers include Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and VMware.

Different cloud providers offer different cloud resources, such as cloud storage, machine learning, big data analytics, serverless computing, databases, and more. Most businesses that move to the cloud implement some form of a multi-cloud model. A multi-cloud solution is a solution that’s transferable across many different cloud infrastructures. These solutions typically leverage cloud-native technologies and help manage workloads across many different clouds.

Multi-cloud management.

Multi-cloud management is a set of procedures and tools we can use to manage and secure various applications across multiple clouds. Multi-cloud management platforms can be difficult to implement. It can be hard to consistently maintain cloud security across different platforms, deploy apps across various environments, and visualize information from various clouds on a single interface. An effective multi-cloud management solution does the following:

Manages multiple clouds from a single interface
Supports multiple cloud providers or platforms
Supports containerization tools like Kubernetes
Provides visibility into cloud resources
Provides artificial intelligence and analytics resources

Advantages of a multi-cloud environment

There are many advantages to adopting a multi-cloud strategy. Let’s take a look at some of the top benefits:

Freedom and flexibility : A single provider might not have all the cloud services that you want. Multi-cloud allows you to take advantage of a wide range of resources, and it also prevents vendor lock-in.
Disaster recovery : When leveraging resources from multiple cloud vendors, there’s a small chance that you’ll experience concurrent downtime or outages. Many top cloud providers offer service-level agreements that protect you against downtime.
ROI optimization : With a multi-cloud infrastructure, you can be selective with the solutions you want to use within your organization. You can allocate your resources effectively and pay only for what you use.
Reliability : Multi-cloud lowers the chances of an unexpected failure shutting down your entire enterprise. You can create redundancies to reduce the risk of failure.
Shadow IT : Shadow IT is the use of IT services, technologies, infrastructures, and projects without receiving formal authorization. Multi-cloud allows you to gain visibility into all cloud services in use, identify breaches, and enforce security policies.
Portability : Containerization technologies and micro-services enable easy portability between different cloud providers, which helps decrease integration issues.
Resiliency : Multi-cloud allows you to allocate your resources appropriately and build an infrastructure that ensures everything runs smoothly and that the business can quickly bounce back in the event of a disturbance.

Multi-cloud vs hybrid cloud

The hybrid cloud approach is often confused with the multi-cloud approach, but the two have key differences. A hybrid cloud environment uses both public cloud and private cloud. This allows you to maintain the security of private data within an on-premises cloud solution or within a private cloud. Hybrid cloud solutions leverage private data centers while taking advantage of the resources available from public cloud providers.

Multi-cloud doesn’t require the use of a private cloud or coordinated operations to work between the different cloud environments. That being said, a multi-cloud infrastructure can implement hybridization, which is sometimes called hybrid multi-cloud. This means that they use both public and private cloud, and these different cloud environments have some level of coordination between the two, allowing you to work within a single cloud IT infrastructure. A hybrid multi-cloud environment allows you to easily integrate Agile and DevOps best practices, securely and consistently deploy and scale data across various environments, and fully control your workloads.