4 Reasons Why Enterprises Should Implement a Multicloud Strategy
DataStax sponsored this post.
Today, organizations are increasingly seeking technologies that simplify deployment of their application workloads in a multicloud design to get lower TCO, build best-of-breed solutions and avoid vendor lock-in. Whether to fully take advantage of the costs of running and managing a private cloud, or to enable developer velocity to efficiently build modern and intelligent applications, the benefits of multicloud offerings are a captivating proposition for enterprises.
According to analyst firm International Data Corp.’s latest report, global spending on public cloud infrastructure and services will almost double from $229 billion in 2019 to around $500 billion by 2023, While early cloud adoption was largely about building new applications on a single cloud provider, enterprises today are increasingly embracing a model that supports multiple clouds.
Here are four reasons to consider a multicloud strategy and deployment:
1. Freedom of Choice
Multicloud provides organizations with flexibility and the freedom of choice to host their applications and data anywhere, on any device and on any cloud at global scale. Multiple-cloud based tools and providers allow enterprises to utilize the best-of-class capabilities of each cloud provider. With the freedom of choice, a variety of partners can accommodate the unique requirements of enterprises and scale with their business as it grows on multicloud architectures.
2. No Single Cloud Provider Lock-In
If a business opts for one single cloud provider, then it runs the risk of becoming locked into continuing to do business with that provider. It can be very arduous for organizations to switch to another cloud provider, once they have moved their applications and infrastructure to a single cloud provider. Any such migration becomes time-consuming, technically challenging and can incur a high cost.
3. Higher Return on Investment (ROI)
While avoiding vendor lock-in is the most important benefit for taking a multicloud approach, competitive pricing is an equally compelling reason to make a strategic shift to multicloud. With a multicloud approach, rather than pushing business processes to align to a single cloud provider, a business now has multiple options — so it can find the provider with the right fit for their business use case, without having to compromise its choices or cost margin. Hosting applications on multiple clouds provides agility, flexibility and better total cost of ownership (TCO) — resulting in higher ROI.
4. Reduced Downtime
Taking a multicloud approach and using the cloud services of different providers eliminates a single point of failure in applications and business systems. Even though public cloud providers typically offer availability SLA of up to three 9’s (99.9%), it is of high importance that businesses distribute core workloads across multiple-cloud infrastructure, to reduce the possibility of downtime.
Making Multicloud Real with DataStax Astra
DataStax Astra, a cloud native Cassandra-as-a-service, is now available on the three major cloud providers: AWS, GCP and Azure. Astra reduces deployment time from weeks to minutes, removing the biggest obstacle to using Apache Cassandra™.
Astra can match compute and database capacity to the usage pattern. Developers can create an instance of a database in minutes and the service is ready to accept API requests from applications.
The NoOps and zero-downtime capabilities of Astra help enterprises and developers build cloud native apps quickly on any cloud provider (of their choice) with zero lock-in and the ability to scale-out to the largest workloads.
Astra’s availability on all three major cloud providers furthers the momentum to deploy applications in a multicloud setup.
Multicloud Is the Future
Multicloud solutions offer clear advantages when it comes to TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), scalability and reliability. However, despite the many potential benefits as mentioned above, there are several challenges that enterprises believe they will face when managing multiple cloud providers. These include the complexity of building multicloud solutions, migrating applications, managing costs, and security.
However, the continuing investments made by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, VMware and others, provide compelling infrastructure offerings — each with their own unique and differentiated application and service benefits. These cloud providers will continue to provide application services over the next decade to further help enterprises innovate and build cloud native applications at scale, making multicloud adoption easier.
It’s evident that the future is multicloud and it is here to stay for as long as enterprises continue to look for simpler, flexible, scalable and best-of-breed tools and application services, to build their application and infrastructure. What this means for the industry moving forward is that more enterprises will actively think about how to establish multicloud strategies and the supporting solutions that they can adopt — to ensure that more enterprises and developers can build with multicloud in mind.
Feature image via Pixabay.