Bert Swope
Enterprises and cloud computing become more integrated and essential for gaining or maintaining a competitive advantage through big data and Analytics. Cloud is now essential in improving operations efficiency and synergy. To optimize the enterprise architecture with the cloud, there are a few strategic questions that need to be considered;
- First, how much cloud business does your enterprise need?
- And, what cloud strategy best meets your enterprise operational and security needs?
- Where do private, public clouds, or hybrid cloud fit in your enterprise’s information workload deployment strategy?
- Does multi-cloud fit in the enterprise’s information workload deployment strategy?
What is A Multi-cloud Strategy?
This probably is the point where the narrative should introduce the principle of multi-cloud. A multi-cloud is an approach to cloud computing that seeks to optimize enterprise costs, Return-On-Investment (ROI), and enable big data analytics, which is already evolving the information workload deployment strategy of many organizations. Multi-cloud has already affected the major software and Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) providers, which have been rapidly evolving their application suites to enable this new reality. As recently as this week, IBM announced that they had moved its Cloud-native software architecture.
Is It Time To Consider A Multi-Cloud Strategy For Your Enterprise?
Multi-cloud is a cloud computing strategy that seeks to align different cloud providers’ capabilities to optimize different business operations and technical requirements. A multi-cloud strategy can be a way to reduce the dependence upon more traditional software vendors and or on a single cloud service provider.
Advantages Of A Multi-Cloud Strategy
The advantages of a multi-cloud enterprise information workload deployment strategy are:
- the enterprise can still operate even if one or more of the clouds providers goes offline or encounter other difficulties.
- enterprises can avoid vendor lock-in since the enterprise’s data is stored on different clouds service providers and could be migrated if need be.
- Multi-cloud can provide a reduction in the scales of data breach vulnerability since breaching one cloud does not provide access to the entire data of your enterprise, even if your organization has not implemented hybrid-cloud (private/public) strategy because all the data simply isn’t all housed one cloud.
- Importantly, multi-cloud solutions are customizable. Every enterprise can select what works best in order to achieve optimal efficiency.
Disadvantages Of The Multi-Cloud
The multi-cloud enterprise information workload deployment strategy has downsides as well. For instance:
- integration across the multi-cloud providers may require more planning, relationship management, and strategic oversight.
- Multi-cloud implementations, while reducing the potential scale of any one security breach, it does provide more than one potential breach point to be monitored, managed, and mitigated.
Conclusion
Based on your enterprise’s industry, use of big data technologies, information security needs, and the use of information analytics to gain or maintain a competitive advantage and or comparative advantage, a multi-cloud enterprise information workload deployment strategy has a place in optimizing your enterprise’s technical and information strategy. Especially when your multi-cloud strategy includes a hybrid cloud (public/private) as a major pillar in your cloud strategy.
