A common challenge for today’s businesses is providing seamless digital experiences to customers and clients alike. They have realized that digitization is the best way to stay ahead of the competition and leverage available technology to reduce operational costs, offer flexible products and services, and achieve the scalability required for business growth.

The solution for doing all these is embracing the cloud. The cloud allows businesses to store and retrieve data and is also crucial for all-around computing, which is essential in the age of big data and data analytics. Businesses are increasingly using multi-cloud solutions and integrating their capabilities into their core IT infrastructure. However, doing this comes with some challenges, which we will explore in this article and look at the best solutions for dealing with them.

What is Multi-cloud?

Multi-cloud is an IT architectural design where businesses use multiple public or private cloud service providers to leverage their hardware, software, and services. A popular model is Infrastructure-as-a-Service, which enables the integration of different cloud components into one.

Gartner research estimates that about 75% of today’s largest organizations implement the multi-cloud model, an increase of 56% over the last five years. The reason for this approach’s popularity is the ability to utilize all the available technology without businesses worrying about ensuring a robust and stable IT infrastructure.

Security Complexities Are a Concern

As the number of mission-critical applications running on multi-cloud setups increases, businesses must consider whether they are handling security adequately. All this is keeping in mind that a larger infrastructure has a larger attack surface, where each component has vulnerabilities and weaknesses that can lead to severe security issues.

One of the best ways to manage security complexities is to have complete infrastructure visibility. Businesses and IT professionals must deploy solutions that collect and analyze data about traffic, alerts, cloud-based data collected, and security tools used to secure it.

These solutions must run alongside a robust and reliable internet connection so businesses can react to incidents faster—milliseconds count in infrastructure security—and download or upload the vast amounts of data they need to analyze. The best solution is partnering with internet service providers that provide reliable gigabit internet. Businesses can also realize fiber internet benefits in other parts of their business than gaining insight into and having complete visibility of their infrastructure.

They can also automate end-to-end security that helps them eliminate as many points of human error and failure as possible. Humans are often the weakest link in infrastructure security, an issue compounded in complex deployments such as multi-cloud solutions.

Automation maximizes threat detection, improves incident responses, and minimizes the possibility of costly human mistakes.

Higher Architecture Complexity

Businesses that use a single cloud provider or stick to a single server setup have the advantage of understanding how the complete infrastructure works.

Their engineers are also better equipped to know how to expand and leverage this infrastructure to meet complex and emerging business needs. Adding other technologies to this setup increases architectural complexity.

This additional complexity, which is typical in multi-cloud setups, requires additional time and money to ensure engineers implement it correctly and that it continues working as expected. Such complexity can span various areas, such as data services, backup and recovery, networking, security, and automation. When it does, businesses have to incur expenses related to retaining or hiring people with specific knowledge of specific areas and the different cloud providers it uses.

Businesses can mitigate some of this complexity by embracing various practices like DevOps and using management tools like Kubernetes.

Kubernetes is especially useful in this arena because it removes redundant differences between cloud providers, providing a seamless experience to everyone using the system regardless of the underlying cloud services and providers.

Disaster Recovery

Recovery and reliability are crucial when dealing with cloud services and providers. Many businesses that invest in the cloud adopt a mentality that doing so will resolve all their issues. They also think they do not have to worry about anything since the cloud provider will handle it. This is not always true.

One area that many of these businesses overlook is disaster recovery. While not very common, disasters happen to cloud providers, so they must have a recovery plan in case something happens to their cloud deployment.

The first step in doing this is to understand the models’ different failure points and how they would affect your business and infrastructure if they failed. This understanding is crucial for building a robust stack and reliable applications that can withstand such failure.

Even with these worries, multi-cloud deployments give you peace of mind by providing natural redundancy. These multiple redundancy layers allow you to control risk better across multiple silos. For example, if a single cloud provider has issues like a DNS failure, the other cloud providers won’t.

Cloud providers also have multi-cloud failover solutions that allow smooth transitions to other services in case of failure. Many host different services outside their main infrastructure to ensure these smooth transitions.

Cloud Sprawl

As a business and its cloud service demands grow, it may start having an abundance of resources without realizing it. This is known as cloud sprawl and can affect organizations of all sizes. Once these resources become unmanageable, the business will incur additional costs and might require its engineers to come in, determine what it needs, and reduce resource allocation.

Cloud sprawl has become a serious issue because of how easy it is to spin up a new server or cloud instance. Since organizations can provision server resources whenever they need them, there is little retention time for thinking about what they need to do with them before provisioning new ones.

Businesses must think carefully about each server resource they provision to ensure they use it. They should also monitor their cloud service bills to catch anomalies that tell them they may have cloud sprawl.

Multi-cloud setups are the preferred option for many businesses that want to leverage the advantages of cloud infrastructure and provide the best employee and user experiences. While advantageous, multi-cloud setups also come with challenges that businesses must learn to overcome if they want their setup to work and benefit them as expected.

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• Source: Plato Data Intelligence.