What is Multicloud?

Introduction to Multicloud Deployment

Organizations are expanding their use of cloud services to maintain their competitive edge and accelerate innovation. The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated the scale of cloud adoption to support remote work and collaboration services. 

As cloud adoption increases, so does the trend toward multicloud and hybrid deployments. A survey by Gartner found 81% of respondents use two or more cloud providers. Another survey found 86% of those surveyed plan to increase investment in multicloud or hybrid environments. 

Multicloud environments leverage multiple cloud service providers for the company’s business. A hybrid cloud is a solution that uses both public and private cloud models, often for the security and compliance requirements that on-premise infrastructure offers highly regulated industries. 

The concept of a multicloud deployment is part of a greater trend in advanced IT solutions that focuses on flexibility and scalability. Multicloud deployments enable companies to assign resources according to business requirements and expand as required. A multicloud strategy also improves business resilience in the event of an outage with a single cloud vendor. 

We’ll dive deeper into the benefits of multicloud environments and the challenges, including the complexity of cloud cost management when organizations are leveraging multiple cloud vendors with different pricing and service structures. 

Single Cloud vs. Multicloud

The debate of single cloud vs. multicloud has been prevalent among experts and professionals for years. While multicloud is favored in many cases, it’s important to highlight the pros and cons of both models.

In a single cloud model, organizations leverage a sole cloud service provider for all of their operations. This can include storage, computation, and analysis. 

Single Cloud

Pros:

    A single cloud is easy to orchestrate and manage

    Understanding and executing cost optimization strategies is clear

    Reduced cost for system management and maintenance

Cons:

    May result in a long-term lock-in relationship

    Limits the effectiveness of fail-safe measures

    May be difficult to quickly scale resources for fast-growing businesses

    Limits flexibility due to the constraints of the service provider

Multicloud

Pros:

    Prevents vendor lock-in as each service provider can take over from the other

    Makes scalability processes seamless and hassle-free

    Improves an organization’s operational flexibility

    Provides a backup and a contingency plan in case of a disaster or a cyber-attack

Cons:

    Higher cost of management and maintenance.

    Increased resources requirements.

    More complexity in understanding and optimizing costs across multiple vendors

While it seems that multicloud deployments have many advantages over the single cloud model, the increased cost and complexity make it a more difficult decision to make. Fortunately, advances in AI-based solutions can reduce those costs and simplify operations, making the move to a multicloud model a lot more manageable and cost effective.

Next-Gen Businesses Are Adopting the Multicloud Model

In addition to the benefits described above, a growing number of businesses are adopting the multicloud model for other key advantages, such as: 

Getting the Most From Each Provider

No matter how good a vendor is, they may not be able to provide all the features your particular business needs – especially when considering the changing requirements of any business due to seasonal demand or changes in the size and operation of the business.

As computing requirements change at different times of the year or at different points in a company’s growth, a particular service provider may have a solution that worked well a few years ago but is no longer doing the job. Likewise, specific operations or departments may have completely different requirements which best be addressed by a multi-cloud deployment.

Improved Infrastructure Security

Whether it is a natural disaster or a cyber attack, having a multicloud model is highly preferable when it comes to disaster recovery. The multicloud model provides a mechanism for backup and transfer of resources from one vendor to another, just in case one of the other vendor’s cloud operations are shut down. 

From a security perspective, it is a well accepted premise that relying on a single centralized computing environment significantly increases vulnerability to attacks as opposed to distributed systems.

Reduced Costs

Although companies may require more resources to manage multicloud deployments, it can also be an opportunity for cost savings. For example, if an IT department is looking to add cloud services, they can check with a number of vendors to determine who has the most cost-effective offering.

Challenges of Multicloud Management

Performance Monitoring

Even if there are enough resources to track all operations, monitoring performance is a massive task that can be quite complicated. Since operations are distributed across providers, gaining insight into so many simultaneous transactions and coordinating them into an optimization program is nearly impossible for even the most seasoned cloud administrators.

Manual Monitoring 

Requiring human intervention on a 24/7 basis makes this type of management solution tedious and unsustainable. Manual monitoring and remediation can only be efficient to a limited extent. IT resources must constantly be stretched beyond their capacity or expanded at a constant rate – neither of which makes sense as a viable long-term solution.

Difficulty in Optimizing Costs

Considering the multicloud system is inherently vast and complex, monitoring the costs, identifying waste and defining an optimization strategy is very difficult. This is further limited by the lack of visibility into detailed operations.

Although these challenges are significant, fortunately, there are automated management solutions available that do not require significant manual intervention and can simplify the complexities for cloud-cost monitoring.

AI-Based Cloud Management Solves Multicloud Challenges

Leveraging the advantages of AI, advanced cloud management solutions for multicloud deployments are a scalable and flexible method to mitigate the challenges companies face when migrating to multi-cloud deployments. Some of its most prominent features include:

Management of Cloud, Business and Revenue Metrics

Advanced AI Monitoring solutions can provide insights into the metrics of end-to-end operations. In simple terms, you can monitor your operations, according to goals and costs.

With numerous metrics in place, an AI-driven cloud management solution can provide a true picture of cloud costs by analyzing all of the relevant data. 

Correlation of the Metrics and Costs

Specialized algorithms correlate metrics with costs. By monitoring your cloud metrics together with your revenue and business metrics — you can understand the true unit economics of your SaaS customers, features, engineering teams, and more.

Real-time Anomaly Detection and Cost Alerts

If the system is not functioning properly or the cost of a particular activity is beyond the optimum amount, then the system administrator will receive immediate alerts and can take the necessary steps to correct the situation.

This provides value in two important ways: First, detection of operational anomalies can prevent costly downtime and second, keep costs in check.

AI and ML Forecast Cloud Resource Usage

Advanced monitoring solutions provided by Anodot, come with embedded AI and ML features built-in. These can be leveraged to make predictions and forecast the usage of cloud resources across multiple vendors, and geographic locations according to seasonal demand. In this way, Cloud administrators can prepare themselves for the additional load they may face at any given time in the future.

Visualization of End-to-End Cloud Operations

Visibility of all data in real time is an incredible advantage for solving many of the challenges presented in multi-cloud management.  Anodot’s AI-based cloud management solution provides a complete visual of cloud operations that makes it clear to administrators how to optimize cloud resources according to business requirements and budgetary constraints.

Implementing Anodot’s cloud cost management solution has significant benefits for administrators including:  

•     Full control over multi-cloud costs
•     Granular visibility into operations
•     Correlation and insight on key cloud and business metrics
•     Constant infrastructure optimization

Multi-cloud deployments have many advantages but also present management challenges. AI-based cloud cost management solutions, such as Anodot, help overcome these challenges making for a more seamless transition from Single-Cloud to Multi-Cloud deployments.