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Maximizing Cloud ROI: Multi-Cloud Adoption Benefits
Multi-cloud adoption can offer significant benefits for your organization, including improved performance, increased resilience, and reduced costs. However, to maximize these benefits, you need to take a strategic approach to its adoption.
Multi-cloud adoption refers to using two or more cloud providers for different business functions, such as infrastructure, applications, and data storage. With multi-cloud adoption, businesses can avoid vendor lock-in, improve performance, increase resilience, and mitigate risks. A study found that, by 2021, as much as 90 per cent of large enterprises had adopted a multi-cloud approach and that figure is expected to rise to 94 per cent by the end of 2023.
Here are six areas of consideration:
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Identify your business objectives
Multi-cloud adoption begins with a clear understanding of your organization’s business objectives. You need to align your cloud strategy with your business needs to select the right cloud providers for each application and service you require. Your business objectives will dictate the cloud providers you choose and the services you require. You may choose one provider for data storage, another for computing, and another for software development. Additionally, you must consider your budget, regulatory compliance, and data security needs. By aligning your business objectives with your cloud strategy, you can optimize your multi-cloud adoption.
Evaluate cloud providers
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Choosing the right cloud providers for your organization can make all the difference. You should compare the performance, scalability, security, and pricing of different providers. You should also consider the provider’s geographic location to meet your latency and compliance requirements. You should also take into account the provider’s geographic location, as it can affect latency and compliance requirements. It is imperative to carefully consider the provider’s track record and reliability to ensure that they can satisfy your business needs. For instance, if your business requires low-latency services, you should only consider providers with data centres in close proximity to your own.
Design an architecture
You must design an architecture that can integrate with multiple cloud providers. To ensure maximum scalability, the architecture must be capable of dynamically adapting to each cloud provider’s unique services and requirements. An optimal multi-cloud architecture should enable your applications to communicate with each other, regardless of their location. Be intentional in designing it to scale based on demand, detect, and mitigate security threats and optimize costs by choosing the right cloud providers for each application. As an example, you may want to use Azure for your web applications, while simultaneously leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) for your databases, to get the best performance and cost-efficiency.
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Manage cloud resources
Efficient management of your cloud resources is critical to optimizing the business benefits of multi-cloud environments. Use automation and orchestration tools to manage your cloud resources and ensure that they are running optimally and cost-effectively. Automation and orchestration tools can make it easier to automate the process of managing cloud resources, such as spinning up new resources and managing the lifecycle of existing resources. This can help to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of cloud operations, resulting in greater business benefits from multi-cloud services. Analytics will help you to identify trends and optimize your cloud resources further.
Ensure data portability
To avoid vendor lock-in, ensure your data is portable between cloud providers. You should use open standards and APIs to ensure that your data is accessible across different cloud providers. Consider the use of containerization and microservices to enable your applications to be portable across different cloud providers. This will give you the flexibility to switch cloud providers if needed, and the ability to move your data and applications when needed. Additionally, using open standards and APIs will make it easier to integrate with other cloud services, allowing you to take advantage of the various cloud services available.
Ensure compliance and security
Multi-cloud adoption brings unique compliance and security challenges. Consider using encryption and access controls to ensure that your data is secure across different cloud providers. You should also use identity and access management to ensure that only authorized personnel can access your cloud resources. To further secure your data, deploying centralized logging and monitoring solutions can help you to keep up with compliance and security requirements. With data protection laws coming up in many jurisdictions, it’s a good idea to verify that your cloud providers comply with regulatory requirements, such as GDPR and your country-specific data protection laws.
Businesses can benefit immensely by taking a strategic approach to multi-cloud adoption, including improved performance, increased resilience, and reduced costs. With this in mind, companies should assess their needs and capabilities to ensure that they are making the most of their multi-cloud adoption. To maximize the advantages of a multi-cloud strategy, businesses should identify which workloads will be most efficient and cost-effective in each cloud and determine the right mix of clouds for their specific requirements. Just remember, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all cloud solution – so don’t be afraid to mix it up a bit!
it is important to stay up to date on the latest cloud computing trends and best practices. Register for the annual Africa Smart Cloud & Security Summit to stay ahead of the trends.