The multi-cloud scenario

Businesses are continuing to invest heavily in the cloud for many reasons that have already been mentioned, but the other question businesses regularly review is if just one cloud provider is a good idea.

This scenario is often encountered by more matured businesses that have reasonable experiences with cloud computing already and have really started to utilise the cloud in anger for their IT services.

The question of a single vendor being is used crops up for various valid reasons, such as:

No certainty a single vendors cloud service(s) could fail
Worried about vendor lock-in
Some services are preferred or more matured in terms of capability in one cloud provider over another
Some services are more cost effective in one cloud provider over another
A third party providing a service prefers one cloud provider over another

The issue faced with a multi-cloud approach is not so much the vendors to pick, with Azure still seen as a preference, but it’s when businesses and IT teams get down to management, as managing multiple cloud providers is much more complex than managing just one.

The two main issues businesses are concerned with in this scenario are overall management of security, as well as overall management of cost. This is partly down to:

Cloud providers will have different billing models to each other, and can affect how things are calculated or expected to be calculated
Some services can be purchased in advance (referred to as reserved instances in Azure and AWS) where you pay upfront for a discount. How you then cancel or refund these services if they are no longer needed differ between cloud providers, and that can have an unexpected expenditure impact.
How security hierarchy works and how permissions are either applied, inherited or understood from an architecture perspective differ between cloud providers due to fundamental differences in the architecture of the cloud providers themselves, which can cause all sorts of potential breaches and headaches.

It is therefore critical for businesses considering a multi-cloud approach to cloud computing to make sure that the pitfalls are understood on what their potential impacts could be or problems that could be caused by this.

Applying security analysis and retrieving analytics on resources where costs are causing a potential impact is already advised previously in this eBook, but it becomes evidently even more critical when performing this from a multi-cloud approach.

For 2022 and beyond, IA-Cloud’s SaaS product is a now multi-cloud capable service. With Azure still being the primary use case, optimisation and security analysis is now supported for AWS, with a multi-cloud managed service capability coming in the not-too-distant future.

IA-Cloud makes the difference here as it can assist customers by allowing them to manage their optimisation and related overspends as well as their infrastructure security posture from one single-pane-of-glass interface that operates with the same look and feel for both cloud providers, massively simplifying your management experience and providing a consistent service across two independent ecosystems.