How To Build Out a Successful Multi-Cloud Strategy

Navigating even just a single cloud environment can be complicated enough for any startup. Between understanding the range of features on offer, planning for expenditure and ensuring you have the right expertise to leverage the tool to its full potential, the thought of managing multiple clouds can seem daunting.

However, whether your company is just starting out or has been around for years, the rewards to be reaped from a multi-cloud approach make it a worthy investment. Adopting a multi-cloud strategy offers a whole host of benefits and can allow you to optimize costs when implemented correctly. In fact, a recent Gartner survey of public cloud users found that 81% of respondents are working with two or more providers. In addition, the amount of business applications, services and workloads is set to double over the next two years.

Here’s what companies of all sizes can gain from going multi-cloud, and how they can do so.

For startups, adopting a multi-cloud strategy can be rewarding from day one. If you’re building your proof-of-concept or are in the design stage of building your infrastructure, leveraging multiple environments at once can help you develop faster and with more advanced tools.

With access to multiple clouds, you can play around with the strengths of each provider and combine them to get the “best of all worlds,” increasing agility and eliminating vendor lock-in. Having immediate access to more than one cloud also means being able to take advantage of these features as and when you need them, without having to fully migrate to another cloud, which can be a costly and lengthy process. In fact, Gartner analyst Michael Warrilow stated that “most organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy out of a desire to avoid vendor lock-in or to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions.”

Opting for a multi-cloud environment also boosts security and disaster recovery and ensures easier migration for some data and applications. Cybersecurity is heightened as spreading applications across different providers means an attack is less likely to bring your entire infrastructure down at once. Furthermore, sticking with one provider inevitably runs the risk of losing control of a mission-critical application during an outage. All of this adds to the overall resiliency of your system’s infrastructure.

So, how exactly can you get started with your multi-cloud journey?

While a multi-cloud approach can deliver serious value in terms of resiliency, flexibility and cost savings, making sure you’re choosing the right providers requires a comprehensive assessment.

Luckily, all main cloud vendors offer free trial services so you can establish which ones best fit your needs and see how they work with each other. It will pay to conduct proofs-of-concept using the free trials and run your data and code on each provider. You also need to make sure that you’re able to move your data and code around easily during the trials.

It’s also important to remember that each cloud provider has different strengths—one company’s best option is not necessarily the best choice for you. For example, if your startup is heavily reliant on running artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications, you might opt for Google Cloud’s AI open source platform.

Or perhaps you require an international network of data centers, minimal latency and data privacy compliance for certain geographies for your globally used app. Here’s where AWS could step in. On the other hand, you might need your cloud applications to seamlessly integrate with the various Microsoft tools that you already use. This would make the case for Microsoft Azure.

There are multiple factors at play that you have to carefully consider to ensure ROI of your multi-cloud investment. According to a 2019 Spiceworks study, AWS comes out top for maximum uptime, Azure wins on compatibility and Google Cloud proves to be the best for manageability.