Perhaps the critical takeaway from 2020 is that reliability, flexibility, and security in cloud computing are the key determinants of business success. From the massive surges in consumer usage of data centers driven by the need for remote working and stay home mandates, multi-cloud environments have stood as more reliable, secure, and cost-effective.
Wednesday last week, the need for reliability was highlighted clearly by an AWS blackout. From early Wednesday to Thursday morning, websites, apps, and services on Amazon Web Service experienced a significant outage with incalculable losses. Sites and services including Adobe, Roku, Washington, and Flickr were rendered unavailable.
An expansion of servers to Amazon's predominant distributed computing network set off a chain reaction of errors that caused the massive outage. Amazon said in a statement that “a small addition of capacity to Amazon Kinesis real-time data processing service” set off the widespread AWS blackout.
This made all the servers in the armada surpass the threshold of strings permitted by an OS design, says Amazon, leading to a domino of errors that took down countless websites and services.
"In the present moment, we will be shifting to bigger CPU and memory servers, decreasing the number of servers and, consequently, strings needed by every server to communicate in the fleet,” said the company in describing their response strategy. “This will allow headroom in string count utilized given the number of strings every server must maintain is proportional to the number of servers in the fleet."
It is quite evident that it's time for companies to be proactive in their risk management approach, and look into multi-cloud implementation. The AWS outage is a wake-up call for companies to minimize risk and attain reliability in performance by using more than one cloud provider.
If you pack all your data on a cloud server and that server goes down, you clearly can't get to your data. That is, except if that information is additionally put away elsewhere. Numerous organizations execute methodologies that save data in different locations to maintain a strategic distance from issues on the off chance that one of the servers goes down. With a multi-cloud strategy, you store data on at least two separate cloud environments, so on the off chance that one goes down, your data isn't lost.
Find cloud providers with server farms in different areas who spread workloads across different geographies. This strategy increases performance by topographically conveying traffic to the data center nearest to the end-user. It can likewise radically diminish the risk of unforeseen downtime. If one server farm goes down because of human mistake, malware, fire, or cataclysmic event, your workloads will securely failover to another area.
The benefits of a multi-cloud environment include:
Advanced Risk Management
Risk management is the most incredible advantage that accompanies embracing a multi-cloud system. Suppose one service provider has an infrastructural issue or is targeted by a cyberattack. In that case, a multi-cloud client can rapidly change to another cloud provider or back up to a private cloud.
Multi-cloud environments enable the use of independent, redundant, and autonomous frameworks that offer robust verification systems, threat testing, and API resource combinations. When coupled with a robust risk-managed system, multi-cloud environments can guarantee reliable uptime for your business.
Performance Improvements
Multi-cloud environments allow you to create fast, low-latency systems while diminishing the costs of coordinating the cloud with your IT systems. By empowering businesses to stretch out their cloud computing needs to different vendors, a multi-cloud approach enables localized, fast, and low latency connections that improve application response time, leading to a better customer experience.
Security
A multi-cloud strategy can help secure an organization's primary business applications and data by offering backup and recovery capabilities that give business continuity when a disaster strikes, regardless of whether brought about by a cyber-attack, power blackout, or weather event. Adding a multi-cloud strategy to your business recovery plan gives it a higher sense of security by storing resources in several unrelated data centers.
Avoid vendor lock-in
You may discover a reliable cloud provider and bet everything on them, tuning your system to be entirely compatible with their infrastructure. But what happens if your enterprise outgrows the performance and features offered by this vendor? You will need to keep things moving at the speed that your clients expect.
If you focus on building compatibility with only one cloud provider, you make it both tedious and costly to move your system to a new provider when the need arises. You empower the vendor to control you. You will have to accept their pricing, restructurings, and features because moving to a new provider means starting from zero. You can avoid these problems by using a multi-cloud approach from the very beginning.
Cost control
Each organization has cost as a central concern, and with the rate that innovation is developing nowadays, it is critical to measure need versus cost. Moving to the cloud can allow you to lessen capital costs on your equipment, workers, and so on.
Nonetheless, downtimes and inefficient performance on a given cloud can cost you more time, money, and a bad reputation among customers. Finding a perfect blend of cloud providers that meet your specific needs and work with your budget can significantly reduce costs and improve performance.
To Conclude:
Implementing a multi-cloud strategy is not a simple assignment. Numerous organizations battle with legacy IT frameworks, on-premise infrastructure, and hardware providers. They are frequently restricted in their capacity to create and implement a multi-cloud strategy. Having said that, going multi-vendor will enable you to diversify your deployment, achieve better performance, and prevent service disruptions, and this can be a cost-effective and speedy undertaking with the right expert consultation.
At Cloudride, we are experts in AWS, Azure, and other independent service providers. We provide cloud migration, security, and cost optimization services tailored to your needs.
Let's help you create, test, and implement a multi-cloud strategy. Contact us here to learn more!