For Massimo Bandinelli, Marketing Manager of Aruba Enterprise, the multicloud approach is advantageous: optimized costs, work agility, freedom of choice.
The cloud market in Italy came close to 4.6 billion euros in 2022, recording a +18% compared to 2021. A figure that is not surprising if we think that, in recent years, thanks to the pandemic, there has been a forte accelerating demand for flexibility, both in data centers and in cloud services. The goal that many companies have set themselves over the last year has been to further speed up the digital transformation. Also because the continuation of remote work has required access to one’s own resources in a more agile and scalable way. To meet these needs, some companies have opted for a hybrid cloud approach, relying on both private and public services for their applications and workloads.
More data protection and service continuity
Others, however, have begun to rely on the multicloud, opting for more functional “multi-strategies” for the rapid transformation of their business. In hybrid solutions, several cloud solutions work together in the same environment, each with a very specific task, sharing and intersecting sets of data. Instead the multicloud allows you to to distribute the same type of workload (typically IaaS or PaaS) on different providers, adding an additional level of data protection and service continuity.
The benefits of the multicloud approach
There are many reasons that lead to the choice of maintaining an infrastructure or part of it on different providers. To mention only the main ones: reduction of the risk of lock-in, agility and scalability of the service, ease of migration, level of service and assistance offered (SLA), geographical redundancy and cost optimization.
Continuity of service and security. With a multicloud approach, for example, companies can secure data in a private cloud and manage other areas in a multi-hybrid environment. Enjoying all the benefits of a geographically distributed platform, such as resilience against local outage or a targeted DDoS attack. Suffice it to say that, on average, when a problem occurs with a service hosted on the multicloud, organizations can fix it and restore the service in 29 minutes or less, against the 1672 minutes of those who work only on premise.
Facilitate data transfer
Lock-in. Additionally, multicloud helps mitigate the risk of lock-in with a single vendor. There are in fact cloud providers with highly constrained architectures, but the use of multicloud allows companies to put platforms on different providers in communication. Then to decide where to locate a certain data or a specific application. Every company should create the conditions to be able to easily move their workloads with minimal effort. The amount of data managed in the cloud is very high. Therefore it is essential to facilitate, even at an economic level, the possibility of data transfer. This would make the market faster, more flexible, more convenient, more competitive and healthier. And a company would find itself choosing exclusively in terms of the quality of the services offered.
Aruba’s opinion on the benefits of the multicloud approach
Data sovereignty and performance. Furthermore, the multicloud also represents an essential resource in terms of data sovereignty and therefore of attention to their geographical location. It can actually represent the answer for companies that have precise regulatory and compliance needs, in cases where it is necessary to know where the data resides. Finally, in terms of performance, it allows you to allocate certain resources as close as possible to the end users, thus minimizing latencies.
What multicloud is “not”.
Obviously, it is essential to carefully choose the services that can benefit from this approach according to your specific needs. In fact, multicloud is always part of a larger cloud strategy. For example, although it is essential in the reduction of the outages, multicloud is not a Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity solution. The reason why it will be essential to implement more specific solutions to address this need.
Its potential
The multicloud approach is not in itself a novelty, but what has changed over the last few years is the awareness of the benefits of its adoption. That is, optimized costs, greater agility in adapting to new workloads, integrating existing ones, greater freedom to choose the most suitable technology and provider. It is therefore not surprising that – according to IDC – over 70% of companies will exploit the potential of this solution within this year to guarantee services and products of increasingly higher quality and reliability.