Multicloud

10 Reasons to Adopt a Multicloud Strategy

Introduction

Today, enterprises from every sector and industry are increasingly deploying and implementing cloud solutions to benefit from agility, simplicity, automation, consistent high performance, and low and predictable pricing, among many more other benefits. So what is driving companies to adopt a multicloud strategy? Is one cloud not sufficient? Or maybe challenging enough?

Indeed, according to Gartner’s report, 81% of organizations are working with two or even more public cloud providers already. So let’s see the advantages of choosing a multicloud strategy, so you know more about them and might consider multicloud for your organization too.

1. Best-in-Class Services

Many cloud providers offer the same or very similar services. However, if you want to benefit from the best available services, you might end up seeing that, e.g., the best services for your application are offered by one cloud provider while the database service is provided by another. In a previous blog post, we already discussed why Oracle Cloud is best to run Oracle Database.

2. Choice of Services

Even though the largest cloud provides offer hundreds of services, you might need further services being provided only by a specific provider. For example, Oracle Autonomous Database is only available on Oracle Cloud. And at the same time, it is the best-in-class and industry’s first and only self-driving database. Another example is meeting your SLA requirements for specific services. Keep in mind, Oracle Cloud offers SLAs not only for availability but also for performance and manageability.

3. Agility and Flexibility

With a larger pool of options and services available on multiple clouds, organizations have the freedom to deploy their workloads as they wish and select the cloud services that exactly meet their unique business needs. They also have the flexibility to take advantage of the best price offerings, scalability options, failover, and disaster recovery capabilities and optimize performance.

4. Accelerate Innovation

As a result of the previous three points, you have the access and flexibility to choose from a greater pool of innovative features to benefit from and expand your development and deployment capabilities. This enables you to test and deliver innovative solutions quickly and efficiently.

5. High Availability

If you have been following the news, you already know about the recent multiple outages a major cloud provider encountered, which took down many services and affected thousands of customers. Having your services running or ready to run on another cloud in case of a disaster will protect your data and critical business applications in case of such outages ensuring business continuity and avoiding revenue loss.

6. Enhanced Risk Management

Multicloud adds an extra layer of protection to your business-critical applications. Also related to the previous point, having redundant and independent systems mitigates the risk of losing business in case one cloud provider happens to have a breakdown or is a target of a cyberattack. Additionally, it mitigates the risk that a single cloud provider might not be able to fulfill all your future business requirements and accomplish all tasks effectively.

7. Competitive Pricing

The more cloud providers, the more competition in the market. Customers can compare and benefit from the lowest prices, payment flexibility, and payment options to save costs. While comparing, bear in mind to always compare apples to apples, as generally, you will not find the exact same service provided by multiple vendors. Hence, you need to dig deeper into the details and understand the differences and characteristics of each offering.

8. User Proximity

Major cloud vendors have tens of data centers worldwide, and continuously new data centers are being built. However, suppose your end-users for a new application are in a geographic area where your first cloud vendor does not own any data centers. In that case, you can choose another cloud vendor with a data center in that area to leverage proximity to significantly improve the application response time, providing a much better user experience.

9. Compliance Requirements

Stringent data privacy and government regulations require customers to store their critical data in specific countries or geographic locations and maintain a strict level of compliance. Having the ability to pick a cloud provider based on location simplifies meeting customers’ regulatory and compliance requirements.

10. Avoid Vendor Lock-in

To be honest, when you start to use services of any (cloud) provider or any technology, you will stick with that for a while. Moving the complete infrastructure to another provider is usually not an easy task. Nevertheless, proper planning and considering this point from the beginning makes the job manageable. Remembering the redundancy across multiple clouds, as we talked about earlier, you need to make sure that your application and database run on various clouds seamlessly so you can replace one cloud vendor with another by a simple switchover. Oracle Database runs on-premises, on Oracle Cloud, and on 3rd party clouds, while some of the vendor-specific databases are available only on one cloud, where you will be locked in, unless you invest a considerable effort in migration, if even possible.

By the way, you can use Oracle Data Guard to replicate your data from one cloud into another, switch over and back again easily and even automatically in case of failure using Fast-Start Failover (FSFO).

Conclusion

Today, with so much competition in the industry, several major cloud providers offer hundreds of services, low prices, and payment options. Customers have real options to choose a cloud provider based on their requirements and needs. As we have seen, there are widespread benefits to take advantage of when using services from multiple cloud providers simultaneously. So it is worth it to investigate, plan, and adopt a multicloud strategy for your business-critical applications.

In the next blog post, we will talk about the considerations and challenges of multicloud and how to overcome them. Stay tuned.

Further Reading

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