Multi-cloud: A business imperative and cloud transformation essential

Companies are rapidly transitioning to multi-cloud adoption, with integration rates of 80% across their businesses, marking a move away from traditional single cloud models and signalling a shift to diversified cloud use cases. Notably, 78% of these businesses are using more than three public clouds. This trend highlights the need for multiple clouds and different cloud service providers for purpose-specific outcomes.

As the multi-cloud infrastructure continues to evolve, enterprises are positioned to maximise returns on their cloud investments, encouraging innovation, agility, and competitiveness in an increasingly digital landscape. Improved flexibility, strategic cost management, and efficient risk mitigation are some of the essentials for seamless adoption of multi-cloud, with influencing factors including compliance with global regulatory requirements and addressing ever evolving challenges in today’s dynamic business environment.

Cloud computing and DevOps have changed business operations, so choosing the right cloud infrastructure is critical. While every cloud infrastructure offers distinct advantages, there’s a bone of contention between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. Multi-cloud deployment increases flexibility, scalability, and accessibility to the latest technologies from leading providers. On the other hand, hybrid cloud solutions provide greater ownership over specific IT infrastructure elements.

Hybrid and multi-cloud

Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are two distinct computing approaches, each designed to address specific organisational needs. Hybrid cloud combines at least one private or on-premises component – datacentres – with public cloud. Hybrid cloud offers benefits of multiple types of cloud environments for greater efficiency and functionality. The choice between the two depends on an organisation’s objectives.

A multi-cloud approach combines the capabilities of various types of public cloud architecture while allowing each of the cloud types to focus on specific tasks. Unlike hybrid cloud, which depends on interconnectivity, multi-cloud operates and manages data, processes, and workloads independently. This results in greater flexibility and agility. Moreover, multi-cloud environments enhance resilience and redundancy, as workloads can be distributed across multiple cloud platforms, ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery. However, hybrid cloud offers the advantage of handling sudden spikes in demand by easily shifting to a public cloud environment from the private cloud and helps keep sensitive data on premises.

Key benefits of multi-cloud

When considering multi-cloud adoption, there are several benefits that organisations obtain to successfully improve their operations and achieve strategic goals. Here are some key benefits:

• Flexibility: Multi-cloud gives organisations the flexibility to choose services from a variety of cloud providers, ensuring they best match specific business requirements.
• Agility: Adopting multiple cloud vendors increases agility, enabling faster solution development, reducing time to market, and fostering innovation.
• Quick time to market: The agility of multi-cloud ensures rapid deployment from identifying business needs to secure solutions, enabling faster time to market.
• Cost optimisation: Choosing from multiple cloud providers results in cost efficiencies, especially advantageous in situations requiring high storage costs.
• Built-in redundancy: Multi-cloud architecture by its very nature adds redundancy across global providers, ensuring flexibility and availability during downtime.
• Technology portability: Multi-cloud supports technology portability, providing platform-agnostic solutions hosted on the provider of choice and seamless migration between providers for increased flexibility and simplified management.

As the multi-cloud paradigm continues to evolve, it will be a catalyst for innovation that enhances agility and competitiveness in a dynamic and ever-expanding digital realm. Essentially, businesses are poised to optimise their cloud investments and plan for a future defined by continued growth and success.

However, the road to multi-cloud success does come with a set of challenges. Firstly, the shift to multi-cloud can prove to be complex and overwhelming for various organisations, especially those which are still largely reliant on legacy systems, processes, and methodologies. Also, diverse, and disparate infrastructure make the transition painful, compromising visibility, availability, and performance. All this can lead to poor user experience, decreased efficiency, and cost escalations. But, with smart planning and strategic technology partnership, organisations can address these challenges and the benefits of multi-cloud adoption will far outweigh potential drawbacks.

“The significance of the role of a technology partner cannot be overstated in a company’s cloud transformation journey.”

By bringing in technology specialists with domain expertise, industry knowledge, and comprehensive cloud and network solution suites, enterprises can focus on their core competencies and business objectives while the technology partner oversees all cloud deployments and implementations. This is where Tata Communications comes in with its full stack of solutions catering to ‘to, for and between the cloud’.

Embarking on the multi-cloud journey with Tata Communications

Tata Communications recognises the significance of multi-cloud connectivity and is actively improving its capability to drive the next wave of cloud connectivity. Tata Communications IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect built on our global digital fabric is designed to scale at ease. With expertise across the entire network transformation ecosystem, we have a proven track record of empowering businesses to accelerate, scale, and enhance the performance of their digital initiatives. Our focus is on ensuring that the chosen cloud environment prioritises reliability, agility, and efficiency.

So kickstart your multi-cloud journey with Tata Communications by crafting a meticulously aligned migration strategy. Our experts provide a planned approach to migrate, operate, and innovate on the cloud, safeguarding your business from unexpected cost increases and operational risks. You can also try out the solution on a 14-day free trial period.

Explore Tata Communications multi-cloud services here.