1. Multicloud lets you harness the strengths of multiple cloud providers
When you integrate several clouds in your company’s IT strategy, you can adapt your business needs to the best cloud providers for each task. For example, you might choose one cloud provider based on where data is stored, and another because they offer more services. The big, global players can offer hundreds of cloud services, but this still doesn’t mean that they will be able to meet all your cloud needs, at least not in an optimal way.
By choosing several cloud providers you can take advantage of the best of what each one has to offer, and mix and match services to fit your applications, workloads and tools. Different business might have different demands, and even if a global platform might be ideal for parts of the operation, smaller and local cloud providers may very well be the ideal solution for another. Rather than adapting your processes to what a provider is offering, you will have the freedom of accessing multiple options, which each on their own can give you the best match for various parts of the company. Multinational organizations will also most likely discover that what is optimal for one geographical region often is not good enough in another. Multicloud solves the issue for you.
Read more: Gartner "Why Organizations Choose a Multicloud Strategy".
2. You avoid lock-in to a specific provider
One of the most important advantages of multicloud is that you avoid the lock-in effect, an effect often rising from the use of only one cloud provider. If all your applications are built to work on a specific cloud platform you will also be bound by that platform. This will make a change at a later stage more difficult. The provider may have met all your needs initially, but if you outgrow their cloud as your company takes off and need to scale up, it might no longer be the best choice for you.
If you use multicloud from the start your developers can also build apps that work on multiple platforms, which will give you maximum flexibility to take advantage of the best price image or performance of various platforms. By avoiding lock-in you also gain a better opportunity to optimize costs and performance.
To many companies, one of the most important advantages of multicloud is of course the ability to choose a cloud service that best meets the company needs at the lowest possible cost. With a multicloud strategy it becomes easier to optimize both cost and performance. You should also keep in mind that cloud providers often launch new services and change their prices. Prices might increase, or better offers might become available elsewhere. If you’re locked in with a single provider you can’t take advantages of these better opportunities as easily. But if you choose a multicloud strategy, you and your organization maintain power, not the cloud provider.
In other words, you can enjoy the freedom of comparing providers and securing the best available prices based on your specific IT needs. And because you aren’t limited to the terms of a single provider, you can choose the best provider based on everything from flexibility of contract and payment, to scalable capacity and other important aspects. Article ” Link Gartner report “Multicloud; Why it matterst
3. Increased security and preparation for the unthinkable
Multicloud can also help protect the critical business applications and data of a company, by offering overlapping features for backups and restoration, should an accident occur. This is true regardless of whether the accident is a broken disk, a power cut or a natural disaster. Adding additional layers of cloud (based on different geographical locations) as part of your security strategy will increase your levels of reliability, stability and safety. Many risks involved with storing data in the cloud are also reduced with multicloud. If a provider is the subject of server errors or a cyber attack to their infrastructure, a user with multiple clouds can easily change to one of their other providers or back up to a private cloud. Article How to Run Security Threats Diagnostics
4. Choose ”best of breed” applications
Historically, the choice many organizations have faced has been between a large and wide application that is capable of many things but not excellent at anything, or small and niched special applications that are best in class at what they do, but get stuck in “integration hell”. Today, most organizations want to pick the best tools/applications for each task. A multicloud strategy makes this easy to do as the organization can pick applications based on business needs rather than the requirement of rational operations from the IT department. This provides that a modern hybrid platform for integration between the different cloud services and legacy environments is included in the multicloud strategy.
5. Reduce issues of shadow IT
It can also be worth mentioning that many companies already use multicloud without realizing it. So called shadow IT is a term that refers to technology adapted by individuals or departments independently from the IT department. The extent of such shadow IT is often extensive. By officially implementing a multicloud strategy you can better create an overview of everything that is being used – to ensure compatibility, integration and security.
Conclusion
At the end of the workday it’s all about the fact that companies need to use the most suitable environment for their features, tools and data. Organizations that use a hybrid solution and multicloud strategy can optimize performance, achieve significant cost savings and gain meaningful advantages over the competition in ways that are not possible with a single provider.