What Is Multicloud?

When it comes to cloud computing, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. Some workloads need to scale up quickly, others have unique storage and latency requirements or face data compliance regulations, and some need to prioritize cost. To address these variable needs, organizations frequently rely on a multicloud strategy, in which they strategically distribute workloads across clouds managed by various cloud service providers.

A multicloud strategy gives organizations flexibility and control over how they consume cloud resources and services. It allows them to choose the cloud services that present the most value, helping them to optimize operations to achieve business goals. It also helps them optimize performance and cloud spending, mitigate the risk of vendor lock-in, and move into new markets.

How Does Multicloud Work?

A standard multicloud computing environment works by connecting businesses to resources and services from a variety of public cloud providers, including hyperscalers—that is, large-scale cloud service providers—smaller regional data centers, and specialized providers. This allows businesses to distribute workloads between public clouds in a way that aligns with their unique business needs.

For a generalized example, an enterprise could leverage the scalability of a major hyperscaler, like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform, to run periodic workloads for back-end applications, such as during seasonal spikes in demand for goods and services or when ad hoc data analysis is needed.

For less-demanding workloads, said enterprise may prefer to rent server space from a regional service provider, which could have potential advantages in terms of cost savings and lower fees. They may also elect to do business with a specialized service provider such as a content delivery network (CDN), allowing them to provide more responsiveness for client-side applications.

Then, if market conditions or business goals change, they can choose to move or migrate workloads to a different cloud service provider that offers a better value proposition.

This flexible cloud architecture is made possible by special tools and software that enable resources to be managed across multiple clouds.

Multicloud Management

Various virtualization technologies, including virtual machines (VMs) and containers, allow cloud resources to be pooled into a virtual environment. Once integrated, cloud resources can be observed and managed from a graphical user interface. Vendor-specific tools and cloud management platforms provide a consolidated dashboard for orchestrating workloads across multiple clouds. These solutions make it easy to distribute data and applications between multicloud resources and to integrate on-premises infrastructure with the cloud.

With all the workloads observable and manageable from one place, IT decision-makers can implement strategies to optimize performance and cost, streamline operations, and apply consistent security protocols across the multicloud environment.

VMs vs. Containers

Both VMs and containers can be used to package applications/workloads and distribute them between servers. Both are commonly used in multicloud environments.

VMs are a mature technology that excels at supporting legacy and monolithic workloads. Containers have gained traction in recent years for their high portability, which makes them easy to deploy across multiple environments.

Frequently, organizations need to run VMs and containers simultaneously. Hybrid management solutions such as Red Hat OpenShift can help orchestrate container-based and VM-based workloads from the same control interface.

Multicloud vs. Hybrid Cloud vs. Hybrid Multicloud

Multicloud is closely related to hybrid cloud. Hybrid clouds invoke a mixture of public cloud resources and privately owned infrastructure to meet diverse application and workload requirements. When devising a multicloud strategy, it can be helpful to know the distinctions between types of cloud models:
 

• A multicloud model strategically distributes workloads between multiple public clouds.
• A hybrid cloud model strategically distributes workloads between public and private clouds and on-premises and edge infrastructure. Workloads that benefit from flexibility and scalability can run in the public cloud. Workloads that require a high level of control, accuracy, uptime, customization, security, or data governance enforcement can run on company-owned infrastructure.
• A hybrid multicloud model strategically distributes workloads between multiple public clouds and multiple private clouds or on-premises servers. This allows workloads to be placed wherever they run best, giving businesses greater control over workload optimization.

Benefits of Multicloud

Distributing workloads across the right combination of clouds can benefit business operations in several ways, including:
 

• Performance optimization: In a multicloud environment, resources can be optimized to meet specific performance needs. Workloads can be paired with cloud services that have the ideal performance metrics for them, such as uptime, latency, and capacity. Workloads can also be distributed within close proximity to the end user or consumer to improve load times and reduce latency.
• Vendor lock-in prevention: Cloud vender lock-in occurs when a business becomes overly reliant on a provider’s ecosystem because of proprietary software, APIs, formats, and other unique offerings, making it cost prohibitive to switch providers. Multicloud environments reduce dependency on singular service providers and give businesses the flexibility to migrate workloads without having to significantly reengineer applications or redesign architecture in the event of a change to services or a price hike.
• Cost optimization: Integrating resources into a multicloud environment provides visibility and control over the resources used and their cost, helping to avoid overruns. It also facilitates cost-saving strategies such as rightsizing cloud resources to match the workload and taking advantage of lower-priced per-second rates for certain tasks.
• Data sovereignty: Distributing workloads across multiple clouds, including regional cloud service providers, helps businesses comply with data regulations, which can vary by region.

Challenges of Multicloud

Multicloud environments require careful planning and management to minimize complexity and forestall potential challenges.
 

• Complexity: Multicloud environments span many public clouds, increasing the complexity of IT operations. Proper management often requires staff with highly specialized skill sets and deep familiarity with cloud management platforms.
• Security: Securing the cloud is a holistic practice encompassing access controls, data encryption, and network security. Cloud security tools are necessary to orchestrate consistent security protocols across multicloud, edge, and on-premises infrastructure.
• Software vendor lock-in: While cloud management platforms help avoid being tethered to a specific cloud service provider, these tools can become a new source of dependency and lock-in. Using open source cloud software supported by an active community of developers helps avoid this form of software vendor lock-in.

Multicloud Use Cases

Multicloud environments unlock many revenue-generating and cost-saving use cases, including:

Expanded Markets

With multicloud capabilities, businesses can expand their geographic footprint by using cloud services from multiple global hyperscalers and regional vendors. Multicloud architecture and data management tools help automate the process of staying in compliance with regional data governance laws.

Accelerated Performance

A multicloud environment can help accelerate application performance by providing compute and storage resources in the right place at the right time. Placing workloads closer to end users via a regional data center—or in the case of hybrid multicloud, a private cloud or edge network—reduces the distance data is sent over the network, helping to reduce latency and bandwidth needs. This can help to improve response times and, potentially, lower costs. Periodic workloads can also be run on more-powerful hardware when needed.

Improved Resilience

Multicloud setups help organizations minimize downtime related to service outages by allowing them to use tactics such as business continuity, redundancy, and disaster recovery. By duplicating critical applications, data, and infrastructure in geographically diverse data centers, operations can continue to run smoothly or get back online faster in the event of an outage or localized disaster.

The Future of Multicloud

Multicloud computing is now a mainstream practice. According to The Wall Street Journal, 85 percent of businesses use two or more cloud platforms, while 25 percent use five or more.¹ Elsewhere, Gartner forecasts that, by 2028, cloud computing will be a requirement to stay competitive in every sector and industry.² That means having a multicloud or hybrid multicloud strategy in place is a business differentiator. Business decision-makers should start preparing today by implementing comprehensive cloud management practices.