Five (5) Considerations for Drafting a Multi-Cloud Strategy

Development, implementation, and maintenance of a multi-cloud strategy could be a daunting undertaking, particularly for organizations which are considering their first major cloud migration or organizations that have been using a single cloud environment and are now getting ready to upscale to a more complex cloud infrastructure.

Although, development of a meaningful strategy may require a laundry list of considerations, I wanted to share the following Five (5) which I consider as key:

1.      Have an in-depth understanding of your full portfolio of applications:

This will help you in determining which applications can be hosted on the public clouds, which of the corporate services like email can be deployed as SaaS apps and which of the applications need to be kept on-premise considering they may contain proprietary or business sensitive data or are mandated to be kept on-premise due to regulations.

2.      Consider the 80/20 rule when selecting public cloud providers:

The idea is to have a few reputable providers who can handle 80% of your workloads. This is will help in reducing some of the complexities related to managing a large number of cloud providers. Also, consider implementing your multi-cloud strategy in concert with a hybrid cloud infrastructure, this can significantly improve flexibility and yield many other benefits

 3.      Consider the use of ‘Containers’:

I believe that the container adoption will help with simplifying multi-cloud management challenges going forward, if not already. Simply put, Containers are pre-built images that can essentially run on any of the mainstream cloud provider. Also, with Container orchestration tools like Kubernetes, IT leaders will be able to truly reap benefits of Multi-cloud such as reduced dependency on a single provider, ongoing cost and performance optimization, and improved geographical coverage.

4.      Use Multi-cloud as a fail-over strategy:

Consider designing your multi-cloud strategy in a way that it helps you eliminate single points of failure in your most business-critical processes. The idea is to use cloud services from multiple but dissimilar providers which can greatly improve redundancy.

However, the word of caution is that even though multi-cloud serves as a good fail-over strategy it is still highly recommended to manage and maintain backups of critical data on your own.

 5.      Have a contingency plan for your most experienced cloud resources:

Cloud experienced professionals are in high demand. Therefore, ensure that your multi-cloud strategy includes an insurance plan for when an experienced team member leave the organization: Don’t get stuck in a situation where one person leaving causes a brain drain. Have a plan for cross-training and having a business partner that can provide experienced resources when needed.