Multi-cloud is the key to business success

While we’ve seen the rise of both hybrid and multi-cloud approaches in recent years, the current pandemic has shone a light on the full potential it has to offer businesses.

COVID-19 has brought with it great uncertainty for many businesses across the globe, and with it, has confirmed a long standing belief that businesses that can adapt quickly to change can better weather storms that may arise. For tech teams, it means having agility and flexibility in their IT infrastructure so they can scale up and down, shift workloads and ultimately react rapidly to changing businesses needs. But that’s something that can only truly be realised through the cloud.

While we’ve seen the rise of both hybrid and multi-cloud approaches in recent years, the current pandemic has shone a light on the full potential it has to offer businesses. And increasingly that the future of IT infrastructure lies not just in the cloud, but in a multi-cloud approach.

More than cost savings

Now more than ever, access to innovative and adaptable technology is critical, so it makes sense that a multi-cloud approach is the way forward. Beyond short-term cost savings, it provides the agility, flexibility and security all businesses need right now to adapt to change.

Embracing a multi-cloud strategy allows businesses to take advantage of the strengths that different cloud providers offer. For example a business may use the AI and machine learning capabilities of one provider and storage from another. By choosing multiple cloud providers an organisation can mix and match technology strengths to best suit the needs of specific applications and workloads.

From a risk management and business continuity perspective multi-cloud has clear benefits. If one service was to go down, your businesses would be able to survive in the face of any surface disruptions, providing a fail-safe option for businesses. Investing in a multi-cloud strategy means that an organisation’s critical business applications and data are protected by backup and recovery capabilities. This ensures business continuity during any potential emergencies — whether a failed disk, power outage or even a natural disaster. In addition, a multi-cloud strategy provides a required level of reliability and security to businesses as it offers the ability to replicate resources in a cloud region away from the disaster area itself.

There’s also a cost saving element here that can’t be overlooked. Embracing multi-cloud gives businesses the ability to select the cloud services and offerings at the best available price point. For businesses, it means it can prioritise both cost and performance.

Making things simpler for businesses

But for multi-cloud approaches to work for businesses, it needs to be easy. Simplicity is key, particularly in the current climate — and was a big reason for the expansion of our Anthos offering to support more cloud providers. We know businesses want to run applications with multiple providers but there needs to be a consistent platform that makes it simple for teams to develop, deploy, and manage applications quickly and flexibly across all.
Furthermore, regardless of what’s happening in the world, enterprises need application platforms that embrace the technology choices already made — while still giving them the flexibility and agility required to weather change and adapt to what comes next. With this in mind, having a consistent platform on which to build applications is essential to success.

For businesses globally, the ability to run applications where needed has been a key factor in embracing a multi-cloud approach. During this time of uncertainty and beyond, businesses need architecture that both supports the technology stacks they’ve already built but also offers them the agility and flexibility required to weather change — or even take advantage of it. It’s evident that multi-cloud is the future and given our current circumstances, businesses that look to the cloud will be the ones to succeed, both now and in the future.

Mark Innes is VP ANZ at Google Cloud