What is multi-cloud?
As digital infrastructure diversify, multi-cloud is emerging as a strategic solution for companies to optimize resources and enhance data security. Find out what this approach is, what the benefits are, how it works, and what solutions it offers.
What is multi-cloud?
Multi-cloud is an IT strategy that involves using multiple cloud computing services from different providers. This approach allows companies to take advantage of each cloud’s unique features, which are tailored to their applications’ specific needs, data management, and security requirements. By combining diverse cloud environments, multi-cloud creates a flexible and customizable infrastructure, offering better resource allocation and increased resilience to support business operations.
Why use a multi-cloud strategy?
As digital infrastructure become more complex, businesses are facing new and varied challenges. A multi-cloud strategy is therefore an effective solution to overcome these growing challenges.
Meeting diverse business requirements
With applications becoming increasingly diverse, companies need to adapt their cloud infrastructure to suit the specific needs of each service. A multi-cloud architecture offers the flexibility to choose services that are tailored to each application’s unique business requirements, whether it’s for storage, compute power, or security.
Ensure compliance and security for sensitive data
Data protection regulations are constantly evolving, particularly in highly regulated industries such as finance and healthcare. Multi-cloud allows businesses to distribute data and implement security solutions specific to each cloud environment, ensuring compliance with privacy standards.
Optimizing resources in the face of budgetary constraints
Technology budgets are constantly evolving, and companies are looking for cost-effective solutions. Multi-cloud allows for finer cost management, with the ability to select the most cost-effective services for each need. This approach helps companies minimize expenses while maintaining a high level of performance.
The advantages of multi-cloud
Adopting a multi-cloud strategy gives businesses increased flexibility and resilience, while meeting modern cost, security, and performance requirements. Here are the key benefits of multi-cloud.
Flexibility and adaptation to specific needs
Multi-cloud allows businesses to select specific services for each application, leveraging the unique benefits of each cloud provider. This variety of options helps teams, including DevOps teams, to customize their solutions based on business needs - for example, one PaaS provider may be preferred for applications that require integrated development environments, while another will be more database-friendly.
Cost and performance optimization
With the multi-cloud, companies can optimize their budgets by selecting the most cost-effective services for each task. By combining the best pricing for storage, compute power, or network, they maximize their return on investment while ensuring high performance. This cost-effective approach is particularly useful for companies that want to reduce their spending without compromising the quality of their services.
Enhanced security and compliance
Multi-cloud enables organizations to manage their data according to each type of information’s unique security and compliance requirements. Sensitive data can be hosted in a highly secure cloud, while less critical applications are deployed in a public environment. This allocation of resources helps companies comply with local and international data protection regulations, a key challenge for regulated industries.
Resilience and business continuity
By distributing their resources across multiple platforms, organizations can minimize the risk of downtime. In the event of a vendor failure, they can move their operations to another cloud, ensuring business continuity and rapid disaster recovery. Serverless architectures and containerization solutions can also be implemented to ensure flexible, automated resource management, enhancing systems’ resilience to outages and cyber threats.
Vendor independence
By diversifying their suppliers, companies avoid becoming dependent on a single platform - a situation known as vendor lock-in. This independence allows them to negotiate more favorable terms of service and adapt their architecture more easily to new technologies, without the constraints imposed by a single provider.
App accessibility and mobility
Multi-cloud makes it easy to access applications from different environments, allowing teams and partners to access resources remotely. This approach promotes productivity and flexibility, particularly in a remote working context, and for cloud-native applications . With this increased accessibility, companies can mobilize their applications and workers wherever they are, contributing to a more dynamic and connected work environment.
The pillars of a multi-cloud architecture
A multi-cloud environment relies on a combination of sophisticated architectures and tools that enable companies to manage their resources across multiple clouds. This approach ensures the consistency and interoperability of applications, data and services across a distributed ecosystem, with key elements ensuring its smooth operation.
Orchestration and service management
Orchestration is a central part of a multi-cloud architecture. It enables the coordination of different applications, databases and storage systems to optimize performance and manage costs efficiently. For example, a company might use a centralized dashboard to monitor the status of its applications across multiple clouds in real-time, ensuring optimal control of all available resources.
Security and identity management
Security is key in a multi-cloud environment to protect sensitive data across multiple platforms. To manage access and prevent cyberattacks, businesses use solutions like Single Sign-On (SSO), which allows users to access multiple applications with a single user ID. For example, a health organization might configure secure access to health records to ensure that only authorized users have access to them.
Network integration
To keep things running smoothly, clouds must be interconnected effectively, allowing applications to communicate, exchange data, and operate together as an integrated network. Solutions such as software-defined networks (SDNs) and multi-cloud VPNs facilitate this exchange. For example, a global organization might use a multi-cloud VPN to ensure a secure connection between its dispersed desktops and applications hosted across multiple clouds.
Comparison between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are often confused, but each addresses different goals. Hybrid cloud is characterized by the combined operation of a private cloud and a public cloud, often based on an IaaS infrastructure to offer increased flexibility, allowing businesses to store their sensitive data in a secure environment, while leveraging the flexible power of the public cloud for other needs. This approach is particularly well-suited to companies that want to maintain strict control over some of their resources, while taking advantage of the flexibility of the cloud.
Hybrid cloud advantages
- Increased security for sensitive data, stored in a private, protected environment.
- Increased control over critical internal resources.
- Flexibility to integrate applications that require different security and performance environments.
Depending on their needs, some companies choose to combine hybrid and multi-cloud approaches to best adapt their cloud infrastructure.
Solutions from OVHcloud
OVHcloud offers a full range of cloud solutions, designed to meet the needs of businesses adopting a multi-cloud strategy. These solutions simplify infrastructure management, ensure data security, and optimize application performance across multiple cloud environments.
OVHcloud Multi-cloud Orchestration and Management Solutions
VMware on OVHcloud
Easily migrate your VMware environments to the cloud without modifying your applications. VMware on OVHcloud allows you to keep your existing tools and configurations, facilitating centralized and secure management of your multi-cloud resources. Ideal for businesses looking for a smooth multi-cloud transition while retaining control of their infrastructure.
Managed Kubernetes Service
Orchestrate your containerised applications with the Managed Kubernetes Service. This solution allows you to easily deploy, manage and scale containers across multiple clouds, ensuring flexibility and scalability in a multi-cloud environment. Ideal for companies looking to simplify container management while maximizing agility.
Load Balancer
Optimize the distribution of traffic between your multi-cloud applications with the OVHcloud Load Balancer. This solution ensures intelligent workload distribution, guaranteeing optimal performance and availability even in the event of peak demand. Ideal for ensuring resilience and efficiency of your applications across multiple clouds.