Why Your Enterprise Should Consider Multicloud

Mark Fu

Marketing Manager, Huawei Container Storage Solution, Huawei Technologies

What is multicloud?

Multicloud refers an enterprise’s use of cloud services from two or more cloud providers to operate its applications. It involves multiple cloud deployments of the same type (public or private), sourced from different vendors.

Consider the example of an enterprise that provides cloud video services. It works with a leading cloud vendor whose portfolio has the right blend of service-level agreements (SLAs), security protocols, and uptime to host the applications. After a decade running its business via this vendor’s setup, the company hoped to boost reliability and availability, and chose another cloud vendor to back up its data. This is the basic premise of a multicloud model.

To understand the reason why 89% of technology practitioners and decision-makers are considering moving to a multicloud approach as of 2023, it’s essential to understand the use cases and benefits of multicloud.

Multicloud use cases and examples

Some common use cases of multicloud architectures are as below:

Multi-component applications

Imagine you have an app that needs to handle quick scalability for web and application servers. Meanwhile, the backend requires intensive computing power to work properly. If you use just one cloud provider, you might not be able to get the best setup for both parts of your app. But if you use multiple cloud providers, you can choose the best one for each part of your app.

Better latency globally

Using multicloud technology can help a global organization serve customers better by allowing access to servers in different places and improving connections with a fast response time.

Backup and recovery

Multicloud disaster recovery strategies are increasingly common. If the local data center experiences data loss or a cyber event, or the cloud on which an organization hosts its disaster recovery setup fails, knock-on effects, such as increased loads, will impact user satisfaction. Organizations can secure their data by sorting it on several clouds, which also mitigates further malicious cyber events.

Benefits of multicloud

A multicloud strategy offers organizations a range of benefits relating to IT agility and flexibility. These benefits include:

No vendor lock-in

Organizations have the flexibility to choose from different cloud vendors and related features to optimize workloads based on factors like speed, performance, reliability, geographical location, and resilience, and compliance.

Cost savings

Multicloud environments can be an effective strategy for reducing IT expenditure. The cloud enables organizations to not just develop and test their new technologies and services at low costs, but transfer these services to a private cloud later to meet demand for lower operation costs.

Better scalability

With data volumes increasing exponentially, a multicloud architecture is an ideal solution for businesses to scale their storage requirements up or down as and when needed.

Faster performance

Connecting best-in-class cloud providers to the existing IT system helps leverage a high-speed, low-latency infrastructure that significantly improves response time and streamlines operations by deploying nodes closer to the end user.

Resilient systems

Decentralizing important data and services limits the ability of a virus to move laterally within a system, reducing the risk of a successful attack on the network. Moreover, if a hacker targets one of your cloud providers, only the data and applications on that specific platform will be at risk.

To multicloud or not to multicloud?

While many organizations end up with a multicloud environment unintentionally due to poor governance, a merger, or an acquisition, a well-managed multicloud approach ensures access to a wide range of cutting-edge capabilities. If you require global service delivery, rapid product launch, company mergers, enhanced productivity of internal processes, or the development of AI and ML software, embracing a multi-cloud approach can provide you with significant advantages.

Does this have anything to do with containers and storage?

For numerous organizations, the most prevalent challenge associated with multicloud relates to management, data consistency, resilience, and integrating various software environments. Containers can be very helpful when it comes to moving applications from one environment to another. For example, if you need to move software that was developed in a private cloud to a public cloud, containers can make the process much easier and more efficient.

But containers have drawbacks too, a major one being insufficient operational stability. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hopes to utilize professional storage capabilities, like high availability and disaster recovery, to make up for the disadvantages of the container platform.

In future blog posts, we will delve into how containers and Huawei container storage solution empower enterprises to build their own private clouds or choose cloud providers or based on universal standards such as storage space and cost, rather than being limited by proprietary restrictions that may or may not support their workloads.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, products, and technologies of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. If you need to learn more about the products and technologies of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., please visit our website at e.huawei.com or contact us.