In the past you used Azure, or Google, or AWS for your Cloud environment. Nowadays as an organization, you have a lot of things in many different Clouds, also in cooperation with suppliers, partners, and customers. The Cloud games have become more complex – including their own data center. But how?
As Cloud adoption gains significant momentum, complexities in the Cloud compound, and vendor infrastructure continues to mature. Along with this growth comes differentiation, as various vendors become increasingly specialized for certain applications. This has given rise to strategies that are employing multiCloud architectures to improve specific workloads and reduce latency as well as costs.
Selecting one Cloud vendor
It has long been the case that organizations that migrate to the Cloud, initiated this process by selecting one Cloud vendor and using the toolsets and features that were available on this platform. As the vendor’s offerings would mature, those organizations on the platform would mature along with it. Initially Cloud’s offerings were simple. Often these were limited to VMs, storage and networking solutions. Fast forward to today and nearly every week new and specialized features are unveiled allowing vendors to specialize in certain offerings.
Hosting across multiple Cloud vendors
With multiple vendors available and increased business migrations to the Cloud, organizations must also cooperate with the systems used by their suppliers, partners and customers. What started with hybrid solutions, where parts of the workloads are local and the others are in the Cloud, these integrations are becoming increasingly complex as applications can now be hosted across multiple Cloud vendors.
For instance, an organization might have their machine learning algorithms running in Google Cloud, their data hosted on AWS servers and shared Kubernetes clusters hosted in Azure. These diversified solutions, utilizing the Cloud from several vendors, are often referred to as multi-Cloud solutions and are becoming much more popular.
Impact on People, Processes and Technology
Multi-Cloud skilled talent
At this moment, singular Cloud expertise within an organization is sufficient. However, as the market grows, especially for larger organizations that integrate with multiple stakeholders, attracting personnel that are familiar with multiple environments will become necessary. These skills will have to be developed further by those working in the space as it grows to be a demand from the market.
Simpler integration
Google, Amazon and Microsoft are the three largest vendors attracting the most business. By being multi-Cloud Cloud natively oriented across these vendors, it should allow for simplification of the access and integration amongst uppliers, partners and other stakeholders environments. As tooling becomes more standardized in these environments this should lead to more efficient working
conditions for your organization throughout the global market.
Competition is good for all
Multi-Cloud solutions opens up avenues for flexibility as well as cost-savings for end clients. Flexibility in that the lock-in effect is reduced and features can be exploited from multiple vendors. Cost savings occur due to the lower switching costs, forcing prices to remain competitive. Technologies such as Terraform are multi-Cloud compatible and will further accelerate this effect. This combined will naturally lead to increased technological innovation which benefits all parties involved.
Conclusion
These are exciting times as the horizon of possibilities to what the Clouds offer is ever-increasing. As Cloud migrations are increasingly necessitated, Cloud offerings are only expanding as the large vendors compete to draw as many clients to their own environments. By design, the Cloud is made to be flexible with workloads to allow for hybrid solutions; it will be interesting to see the extent to which these players will make similar steps to accommodate integration between themselves. We can however be certain that the organization that operates in the Cloud now should continue expanding their vision to focus on the Cloud at large as to maximize their potential value.
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