Key considerations for enterprises moving to multicloud

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No one in our line of work likes to hear the phrase “massive redesign,” but if you’re part of an enterprise that isn’t planning for multicloud network architecture, it’s a phrase you better get used to. There’s no way a single cloud, let alone an on-prem solution, can support the ongoing needs of any large, competitive enterprise in this age of digital transformation.

It’s better to accept this now and begin planning accordingly than to experience the inevitable chaos as your core melts down trying to hold an aging topology together with patches. In this short post, we will go over the principal design considerations you should prioritize during this critical phase of your continuing digital transformation.

The good news is that — in addition to the inevitable long term imperative — there are substantial short term benefits to migrating to a multicloud environment, including significantly improved scalability, security, and disaster avoidance and recovery. In addition, you’ll be able to write applications once and deploy them across multiple regions and in multiple clouds. Finally, committing to a multicloud architecture will allow you to avoid vendor lock-in.

As with any construct, the foundation is critical. In this case, your foundation is your transit network. You should ensure that it’s sufficiently high-performance and scalable, that you have end-to-end security embedded in the network and that it provides multicloud support. Your network infrastructure should not be a blocker.

Another thing you should emphasize is consistency. Whatever you build in region one, you should be able to consistently deploy the same thing in region two, or maybe in multi-cloud.

You’ll want to extend this consistency to an automation and orchestration engine which should be agnostic of the cloud. It rapidly becomes unsustainably complex when you have to use a different automation and orchestration engine for each cloud in each region. You are looking for a centralized automation and orchestration engine to make sure you can operationalize your applications and visualize your entire network with a single cloud-agnostic approach.

Next, consider availability. Things like your control plane, data plane and management plane should all be highly available.

Going hand in hand with availability is business continuity. Here, we’re talking about your applications.