Planning a multi-cloud strategy is not an easy task, but an essential one if you opt for multi-cloud. Five experts explain how SMEs can put together a successful multi-cloud strategy, starting with Mark Appleton, Chief Customer Officer, ALSO Cloud UK, below:
To make the right decision, SMEs should assess their specific needs, evaluate the benefits and drawbacks and consider factors such as workload diversity, security requirements and long-term scalability. Ultimately, the chosen cloud strategy should align with their business objectives and offer the best balance between agility, reliability and cost-efficiency.
Adopting a multi-cloud strategy can help build and develop the cloud network faster and with more advanced tools. It is an effective way for SMEs to get the most out of cloud computing while maintaining cost-efficiency and control over cloud resources.
Making sure you’re choosing the right providers also requires a comprehensive assessment. Luckily, all main cloud vendors offer trial services to establish which ones best fit your needs. SMEs can reap the benefits of cloud services while avoiding potential problems such as cloud vendor lock-in.
When implemented correctly, this strategy can offer benefits such as scaling cloud services up or down, depending on business needs, and flexibility to choose optimised cloud solutions for specific tasks, without investing in costly hardware or software solutions.
However, with this flexibility comes complexity; more vendor relationships to manage, more agreements to sign and more integrations for IT to manage. The cloud is an ever-changing landscape, and a multi-cloud approach brings its set of challenges. Managing cloud resources can be complex and needs to be configured correctly to maintain security and reliability.
A sufficient cloud bandwidth for services spread across different geographical locations may not always be available or cost-effective. Also, storing data across multiple cloud platforms can be more time-consuming when analytics operators need to gather insights from multiple data sources, and instead of facilitating business operations, the infrastructure can increase the security risks. With a wider attack surface, businesses risk their data to cyberattacks.
For such businesses with small or simple workflows, one cloud provider might be able to meet all your needs. Specific and time-consuming investments are required to build a multi-cloud infrastructure that has the right monitoring tools to run a multi-cloud spread. Single cloud providers can be considered as a solution to help mitigate the risk at a lower cost and time whilst providing an efficient yet simplistic service.
In addition, cloud misconfigurations are one of the biggest issues facing users, which can be introduced in several ways. Spotting them in a multi-cloud environment can be extremely difficult as the problem of eliminating misconfigurations becomes even more difficult.
By consolidating to a single cloud platform, SMEs can achieve a more streamlined and efficient operation that better caters to their cloud needs, whilst tightening their cloud network security against outside threats.
Greg McDonald, Director Sales Engineering, Dell Technologies South Africa:
To unlock the full potential of multi-cloud without being constrained by siloed ecosystems of proprietary tools and services, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) should take a multi-cloud by design approach to streamline IT operations by bringing cloud experiences to dedicated IT environments.
The benefits of this kind of multi-cloud strategy include better IT infrastructure efficiency, greater flexibility to meet challenging requirements, improved time-to-market and enhanced performance. To meet their short- and long-term goals, each business must find the right combination for their structure.
Below is a guide for SMEs to assess, design and deploy their multi-cloud journeys.
Phase 1: Goals and assessment
The first step is to set clear goals for moving to multi-cloud. Reducing IT cost is a key driver, but you may also want to improve compliance and increase competitiveness. At this early stage it’s important to engage with all your key stakeholders to ensure you’re all on the same page. Once you’ve defined your goals, you’ll need to do a deep dive on your applications through the lens of your new multi-cloud goals and decide what action needs to be taken.
Phase 2: Requirements and architecture design
The next step is to define technical requirements that the cloud provider needs to fulfil. The key here is to map these technical requirements back to the business goals.
For example, for an Infrastructure-as-a-Service deployment, some of the requirements you set out could be ‘Automation and API access’, which would map back to a business goal of increasing competitiveness. When these are defined, move on to the architecture design phase. With a multi-cloud by design architecture, IT teams can run individual workloads that increase application efficiency and reduce costs.
Phase 3: Getting people on board
With your requirements and architecture in place, you need to prepare the business for change – no mean feat! It may feel disruptive, but it’s an opportunity to create an agile IT organisation. The journey towards a multi-cloud environment requires new skills, creating new roles and career development opportunities for your staff.
Finally, once everything is in place you can create your roadmap and execute your journey to multi-cloud.
So, what’s the catch?
Every SME’s multi-cloud journey will be different. You may spend more or less time in each phase, and the roadblocks along the way may take time to unpick. However, if you want to stay agile and continue to provide customers with the best experience, a multi-cloud by design approach will keep your organisation ahead of the game.
Josh Boer, Head of Sales, VeUP:
A recent study from Gartner identified that most tech teams will be revising their cloud infrastructure, and as a result, 65% of application workloads will be optimal or ready for cloud delivery by 2027, which is up from 45% last year. With the focus of refactoring the cloud increasingly rising on agendas, it is essential for SMEs to understand how to make a multi-cloud strategy a success.
A multi-cloud strategy refers to employing two or more cloud services from two or more providers. Companies can then distribute computing resources for business tasks to the most relevant cloud services so they are completed in the most efficient ways.
Establishing and organising business needs
The first step to a successful multi-cloud strategy is clearly outlining business needs and how these will be met by the various providers. Once these are established, organising who is responsible for what and keeping regular tabs on the use of each cloud service is essential.
Leaders should set out objectives that align to meet needs, including targets for scalability, cost savings, improved performance and vendor lock-in mitigation.
Not only does this minimise security risks by covering all the business’ bases, it also helps lower costs, as an SME would only pay for exactly what it needs.
Maintaining visibility across operations
Multi-cloud strategies can sometimes limit visibility when IT teams need to access multiple platforms and services to gain a holistic picture of their operations. Ensuring that a company has a single observability solution that allows them to optimise performance and resilience is key.
Robust data management practices should be implemented, including data backup and Disaster Recovery across the multi-cloud environments.
Properly mitigating security risks
Using multiple cloud service providers may also increase the risk of security breaches if appropriate steps are not taken. In order to implement a successful multi-cloud strategy, SMEs need to understand the security requirements specific to each provider.
A consistent governance framework should also be developed to ensure compliance across all cloud providers with industry regulations, as well as internal policies. Through encryption, access controls and compliance measures, SMEs can also ensure better data security.
A successful multi-cloud strategy prioritises organisation to ensure that no data gets lost, or applications forgotten. Packaging applications and databases in containers can make them easier to transport across cloud service providers and makes testing easier for DevOps teams. This makes less points of entry for cybercriminals to infiltrate an SME’s system and for more routine application testing.
Martin Hosken, Chief Technologist, Cloud, VMware, EMEA:
Organisations trying to change the status quo in the business world are doing so by accelerating innovation via software in two or more clouds – aka going multi-cloud. They need faster time-to-value as they migrate their applications to the cloud. However, they are often challenged by infrastructure incompatibility between the various existing clouds or nurturing the right skillset for managing each cloud environment. Eighty-seven percent of enterprises now use two or more clouds, and doing so without a multi-cloud strategy puts them at risk of remaining stagnant in a state we call, ‘cloud chaos’. When cloud choice becomes too great, managing that portfolio across disparate clouds becomes difficult and costly, leading to siloed operations and trade-offs between developer velocity and IT control. In turn, this can produce repercussions on the business, from spiralling costs to weaker competitiveness.
These organisations are waking up to the fact that successfully re-platforming the enterprise cannot be done without building a ‘cloud smart’ architecture. In essence, an approach that’s able to drive a consistent, secure and cost-efficient operating model across various clouds. One that enables teams to select the right cloud for the right application based on its need.
The desired destination of every multi-cloud journey is cloud smart, but how do you make that strategy successful?
Firstly, ask yourself, what are your application needs? Not to mention the technical and business requirements. Once you understand the motivations for adopting a multi-cloud strategy, whether that’s driving IT efficiency or lowering overall infrastructure costs, you can plan which cloud services will best fit. It’s then essential to consider your existing applications and if they already reside in a cloud provider, as well as the overall relationship with the existing cloud provider portfolio and how/if each provider maps to current and anticipated needs.
‘Knowing the why’ of multi-cloud should underpin all that follows. Remaining vigilant of how governance costs can grow with the addition of each cloud and factoring in the added complexity is also crucial to success. While management tools can mitigate some complexity, new skills are needed to manage and take advantage of the benefits of a multi-cloud environment. These skills can come from training existing teams, external hiring or leveraging integration partners and are key to measuring success, whether that’s through return on investment or reduced cost of IT ownership.
As development, DevOps and deployment times all accelerate, teams should also be actively embracing modernisation and thinking outside the box. Transitioning from cloud chaos to a stronger position as a cloud-smart organisation is not a linear process. But you should be using sophisticated, cloud-native operations to innovate and ultimately produce better employee and customer engagement to return on the investment made. When powered by a consistent operating model, a multi-cloud architecture can become the foundation of any digital-smart, innovation-led business.
Assaf Ronen, Chief Platform Officer, Payoneer:
When it comes to SMBs I would not recommend pursuing a multi-cloud strategy because at the scale of an SMB, simplicity really is the key. These businesses don’t have large IT departments and they need solutions that just work, and those solutions are single cloud technologies.
When it comes to looking at cloud solutions, businesses need to be looking at cost benefit and availability and all the major cloud vendors are more available to SMBs than ever before so SMBs should take advantage of that. The major cloud providers are suitable for SMBs when it comes to cost, availability and scalability. In the current market I would not recommend multi-cloud.
The interesting question then becomes at what point does that change? Even for some of the largest organisations in the world it is fine to be dependent on one cloud provider. The reason to go multi-cloud would be less about availability and more about negotiation power from a purely financial perspective. As such it moves from being a tech question to being a business decision that a company should make balancing the fact being multi-cloud increases cost. So, all in all one cloud is enough, especially when architecture that companies use is multi region, meaning that where there are instances in the cloud it is covered across multiple locations.
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