Sep 06, 2018

Cloud adoption is speeding towards a new era. Lines between private, public and hybrid cloud are blurring as the technology becomes accessible for all.

From a business standpoint, having a dynamic and flexible cloud strategy is key to planning for future growth. No single cloud model can fit the diverse requirements and workloads of all business departments. And enterprise needs are constantly changing.

Here are some benefits of a multi-cloud strategy:

• Risk mitigation and redundancy: Spreading workloads and data across multiple cloud platforms prevents data loss or downtime in the event of a localized component failure or DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack.
• No vendor lock-in: Most businesses don’t want to get locked into a contract with one cloud provider. Putting all your eggs in one provider’s basket could mean trouble in the event of a security breach or operational shortcoming.
• Data sovereignty: Certain laws, regulations and corporate policies require enterprise data to physically reside in certain locations. Multi-cloud computing lets you select multiple providers based on their data centre regions or availability zones.
• Flexibility: Not all cloud providers are created equal. Some cloud vendors are considered front-runners in specific services when it comes to ease of use, resiliency and performance. With multi-cloud computing, you can map your organization’s requirements to the proficiencies of different cloud vendors.
• Greater scalability: You need a cloud that can grow with your business. Multi-cloud lets you scale down cloud resources when you no longer need them. As business units increase, you can access more data.
• Cost optimization: Moving and shifting workloads between vendors can significantly lower your organization’s total operational costs.

A multi-cloud strategy lets each business unit choose its ideal cloud services depending on certain needs, which may include:

• Ease of administration
• Data privacy and government regulations
• Concurrency of workloads
• Query performance
• Security and governance
• Specialized functionality, such as machine learning or AI
• Access to big data tools and technologies

There’s no doubt that a multi-cloud strategy is the best way to achieve more agility in the cloud. But it comes with significant risks.

Increasing the scope of your cloud environment puts the pressure on your IT team to maintain visibility, manage numerous vendors and uphold compliance. Spreading resources and data across different clouds with inconsistent security, management and governance models can quickly spiral out of control.

If you want to implement a multi-cloud environment without introducing complexity and risk, you need a consistent infrastructure and set of operations to unify your cloud providers.

VMware’s cloud solutions make this possible.

How VMware Supports a Multi-Cloud Strategy

VMware helps businesses accelerate digital transformation through a host of networking, data centre, virtualization and cloud management products.

When it comes to multi-cloud management, VMware is the industry leader. Its cloud solutions empower organizations to securely and efficiently provision and deliver any application on any device from any cloud.

VMware’s cloud products also make it easy for businesses to maintain control over the growth of their cloud services and avoid cloud sprawl. You get to tap into a broad set of cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and VMware vCloud Air.

If you’re thinking about adopting VMware solutions to manage your multi-cloud strategy, you’ll need to be familiar with VMware’s multi-cloud management platform: vRealize Suite.