For example, what works well for your teams in Google won’t necessarily work the same in AWS or Azure. | July 1, 2019 -- 13:23 GMT (06:23 PDT) The journey toward cloud-agnostic solutions is at the heart of enterprise architecture in today’s digital government. It wasn't always this way; many organizations start by using a single major cloud provider. “The biggest pitfall IT leaders run into with a … A multi-cloud environment could be all-private, all-public or a combination of both. You’re crafting a long-term strategy with high-stakes goals, such as the ability to be extra agile when needed. By registering, you agree to the Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices outlined in the Privacy Policy. SEE: Cloud v. data center decision (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic). AWS has expanded well beyond cloud compute and storage. You agree to receive updates, alerts, and promotions from the CBS family of companies - including ZDNet’s Tech Update Today and ZDNet Announcement newsletters. While one vendor may charge more for data storage, another may charge less—but also charge more for data transfer. Innovations in the cloud in recent years have resulted in a move from single-user private clouds to multi-tenant publi… 3. Among enterprises that use multiple clouds, the hybrid cloud model is adopted by nearly 60%, with multiple public and multiple private clouds much less popular (<20%). Terms of Use, How you can help your business prepare for the future of the cloud, Multicloud: Everything you need to know about the biggest trend in cloud computing, Cloud computing in the real world: The challenges and opportunities of multicloud, Research: Multicloud deployment increases among enterprises, Enterprise tips for managing the multicloud (free PDF), CIO Jury: 75% of CIOs say cloud vendors are living up to their expectations, Australian Red Cross lifts IT maturity through multi-cloud transition, Multicloud deployments become go-to strategy as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud grab wallet share, Freedom of cloud choice: The myths and truths about multi-cloud, Top cloud providers in 2020: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, hybrid, SaaS players, Research: Multicloud deployment becomes new default for enterprise computing, Free PDF download: Managing the multicloud, Enterprise leader's guide to building a successful multicloud strategy, distinguishing between 'multicloud' and 'hybrid cloud', Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms, Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, Worldwide, The best email hosting services: G Suite and Microsoft 365 are not your only options, Best cloud storage services in 2020: Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and more, What is cloud computing? 33% of organizations use multi-cloud management tools. UKCloud has long provided the option for customers to have a dedicated instance of UKCloud’s multi-cloud platform in Crown Hosting or on-premises – distributed cloud before it was called distributed cloud. There are also challenges when it comes to transferring data. This ebook, based on the latest ZDNet / TechRepublic special feature, examines how to play multiple cloud providers off each other and what vendors and tools can help you manage multiple clouds. 93% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy. We tapped several multi-cloud experts for their advice for fellow IT leaders on shaping a multi-cloud strategy. These are just four reasons why cloud computing solutions are a valuable tool for today’s government agencies and businesses. Companies use multi-cloud environments to distribute computing resources and minimize the risk of downtime and data loss. RackConnect® Global provides multicloud connectivity to unify your entire hybrid footprint. In Spiceworks' Public Cloud Trends in 2019 and Beyond survey, 'Managing multiple cloud solutions' ranked fifth in the areas where businesses need more support from cloud vendors, with this requirement more pressing for small and mid-size businesses than enterprises: There's an increasing number of solutions available to help organisations manage multiple cloud deployments. Multicloud is the use of multiple cloud computing and storage services in a single heterogeneous architecture. ResilienceAll cloud providers -- even hyperscale ones with multiple geographically dispersed, redundant data centres -- suffer outages from time to time, so putting all your workload 'eggs' in one provider's 'basket' runs the risk of a mission-critical application becoming unavailable. While it may look cheaper overall moving into multiple clouds, if you don’t manage them correctly and develop a sound management strategy, you’ll end up spending more money despite the relatively similar surface-level prices among major cloud vendors. Other leading public cloud players are VMware Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud and Alibaba Cloud: Among the private cloud providers, VMware is the clear leader, with vSphere in the lead and vCloud Director in third place, separated by OpenStack. On-demand access. According to a survey in the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report: Of course, multi-cloud is not without its own challenges that organizations and agencies must consider. This is known as multicloud computing, a subset of the broader term hybrid cloud computing. However, there are other cloud vendors that can be a good fit for specific needs, such as Oracle, whose cloud offerings include SaaS-based ERP systems and DigitalOcean, which offers a more developer-focused platform. Achieving multi-cloud connectivity across multiple cloud providers. 'Multicloud', by contrast, has more of a strategic emphasis, describing how enterprises use multiple cloud providers to meet different technical or business requirements. A multi-cloud approach can include private clouds, public clouds, or a mixture of both, utilizing different providers. Learn ways to mix and match solutions and avoid common pitfalls when building a cloud-based infrastructure. RightScale's reports show Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the clear leader in public cloud, with Microsoft Azure making rapid gains and Google Cloud Platform some way back in third place. Rapid deployment. We’ll explore these considerations below. An interesting recent development is Google's Anthos, a Kubernetes-based suite of GCP components that will not only allow organisations to run applications on-premises and in Google's public cloud, but also to "manage workloads running on third-party clouds like AWS and Azure, giving you the freedom to deploy, run and manage your applications on the cloud of your choice, without requiring administrators and developers to learn different environments and APIs." Multi-Cloud is Growing but is Not the Same for Everyone A July 2018 survey of over 600 decision-makers, conducted by Forrester , found that 86 percent of respondents had a cloud strategy they considered “multi-cloud.” Receive perspectives on the industries and issues that matter. Going all-in with a single cloud provider is a risky approach, as it creates unhealthy dependencies and limits your options. Apache’s Brooklyn Project is attempting to address this challenge by introducing an abstraction layer that sits on top of multiple cloud providers, making it possible to select the best matching cloud from a diverse landscape. Undertaking this critical IT modernization process (and learning how to move from strategy to execution) is a worthwhile journey for any agency looking to avoid the dangers of vendor lock-in while laying a strong foundation for success. Organizations that do not want to depend on a single cloud provider may choose to use resources from several providers to get the best benefits from each unique service. Explore health and care. 4. SEE: The future of Everything as a Service (free PDF). You will also receive a complimentary subscription to the ZDNet's Tech Update Today and ZDNet Announcement newsletters. RackConnect Global includes our 24x7x365 support and a 99.95% … How should workloads be deployed -- across public, private and hybrid clouds? According to the annual RightScale State of the Cloud Report, the use of multiple clouds is by far the most common pattern among enterprises, with single public, single private and 'no plans' reported by around 10% of survey respondents or fewer. To gain Multi-Cloud Advantages your cloud service provider and integrator must navigate the multi-cloud challenges. By A recent Microsoft study found that 79% of organizations surveyed use a multi-cloud approach, with a whopping 29% responding that they use four or more different cloud providers. As you look to architect a cloud-based infrastructure to support your mission, you’ll need to know how to mix and match solutions effectively while avoiding common multi-cloud pitfalls. A statement on social injustice. Unless organisations are willing to create and maintain their own on-premises data lakes, this will often require a multicloud approach -- again, depending on an enterprise's geographical distribution and workload mix. Today, I want to talk about our unique approach to multi-cloud management and multi-provider cloud, with OnApp On Demand – and how it benefits you as a service provider. Multi-cloud is more than just a buzzword within the IT industry: a vendor-agnostic approach can help to minimise costs and give organisations the freedom to deliver the best and most responsive customer experiences. Assess lock-in features up-front. Freedom of cloud choice: The myths and truths about multi-cloud; Top cloud providers in 2020: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, hybrid, SaaS players In a recent Gartner survey of public cloud users, 81% of respondents said they are working with two or more providers. Please review our terms of service to complete your newsletter subscription. So why are they adopting this strategy? Other examples include starting to invest in customizing a SaaS solution to meet organizational business needs. When you’re working with multiple cloud providers, it’s typically not a short-term play. But achieving the many possibilities that multi cloud offers brings many challenges that may require support from cloud services providers. Securely connect your Rackspace Technology dedicated hosting environment to other data center locations and the private and public clouds of your choice, including AWS, Microsoft® Azure®, OpenStack®, VMware® and Google Cloud Platform. LOOKING FOR A CLOUD PARTNER? Why you need a holistic view of your customer experience. Microsoft has a strong private cloud showing with System Center and Azure Stack, while CloudStack is a consistent presence and AWS Outposts -- Amazon's private cloud offering -- is beginning to make its presence felt: RightScale's findings are broadly echoed by a January 2019 survey from cloud analytics firm Kentik, which reported almost universal (97%) use of AWS (no surprise, since the survey was conducted at Amazon's re:Invent user conference). Minimal management. How can smart metering offset the impact of COVID-19 for DISCOMs in India? Going all-in with a single cloud provider is a risky approach, as it creates unhealthy dependencies and limits your options. AWS was the first cloud computing and offering infrastructure as a service in 2008 and has never looked back as it launches new services at a breakneck pace and is creating its own compute stack that aims to be more efficient and pass those savings along. Mission is the key driver behind every federal agency decision, and IT modernization is no exception. In fact, our own research found that more than half (58%) of companies that currently use one cloud provider plan to expand their portfolio across multiple cloud platforms. The first of these challenges is vendor incompatibility. For enterprises with a wide range of cloud-based workloads, the optimal solution is likely to involve multiple cloud providers. Implement DevOps tools and containers. Analyst Zeus Kerravala recently had a go, and found that, through 2018 to May 2019, AWS and GCP had comparable levels of IaaS downtime (338h and 361h respectively), but Azure was in a different league with 1,934 hours -- over 5 times the outage rate for AWS and GCP. A good multi-cloud strategy starts with where the organization is, whether it’s with a single cloud provider or multiple cloud providers. However, despite requiring "Proven deep and broad expertise with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud," Gartner judges that "no MSP has built a completely transparent, fully integrated multicloud solution". You may unsubscribe from these newsletters at any time. 'Hybrid cloud' has traditionally meant the combination of private (either on-premises or hosted in a colocation facility) and public cloud infrastructure, with orchestration tools used to deploy workloads and manage the balance between the two -- employing public cloud resources for regular or episodic bursts of compute and/or storage requirements, for example. Cloud spending rises again as companies rely on outside providers for apps and security. Luckily, all main cloud vendors offer free trial services so you can establish which ones best fit your needs and see how they work with each other. | Topic: Managing the Multicloud, Special Report: Managing the Multicloud (free PDF). 41% of organizations integrate data between clouds. Devising a smart multi-cloud strategy is an effective way to avoid the perils of vendor lock-in and mitigate risk—while providing flexibility, improving network latency, and offering failover support. For the purposes of this article, a multi-cloud environment is one in which you use two or more public cloud services from two or more cloud service providers. Multi-cloud without the burden of its management. The result across multiple workloads is likely to be a multicloud strategy. While the benefits of cloud are significant, there are challenges that agency leaders need to navigate. This article examines some of these questions, while the remainder of this ZDNet/TechRepublic special report covers these and other multicloud-related issues in more detail. ComplianceData governance requirements -- such as the EU's GDPR, for example -- will often require customer data to be held in particular locations. Select services based on open standards (e.g. One of the unique advantages OnApp On Demand offers over other cloud solutions is the ability to attach multiple compute locations, and infrastructure providers, to a single OnApp control panel. Kentik ascribed this finding to 'younger organizations whose infrastructure has been cloud-only since their inception'. One additional advantage: having the application abstracted away from the cloud environment allows it to be easily ported to other cloud service providers. By leveraging containers, organizations are able to take advantage of cloud architecture patterns like distributed tracing and sidecars—which gives them insight into how their application is performing by centrally consolidating data. Here's how those (actual) cloud services break down by category: As you'd expect, the full gamut -- SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and other as-a-service variants -- is present. By signing up, you agree to receive the selected newsletter(s) which you may unsubscribe from at any time. What’s needed is a way to mix the two features together to solve a specific platform concern. As of now, most agencies do not have one single pane to monitor all environments simultaneously. Containerized OpenStack Clouds? Privacy Policy | In the Forrester/Virtustream survey referenced earlier, there was a roughly equal split on the latter issue: Given the level of ad hoc adoption, it's no surprise to find that respondents favoured cloud providers offering add-ons such as cloud strategy service, deployment, migration and management capabilities. Agencies and organizations are also limited in the tools they can use to monitor multiple cloud environments. You may unsubscribe at any time. Check out Gartner's first Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs), which "enable organizations to manage multicloud (i.e., private and public cloud) services and resources". This limits your dependence on the cloud provider. Learn more about UKCloud for Microsoft Azure here. Their expertise in network infrastructure and connectivity makes the move into infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) a natural step for CSPs. The trend is overwhelmingly moving towards multi-cloud. A July 2018 survey by analyst firm Forrester on behalf of Virtustream found that 86% of respondents (727 cloud strategy and application management decision makers in the US, EMEA and APAC) characterised their organisations' cloud strategy as 'multicloud', identifying most with the description 'Using multiple public and private clouds for different application workloads': Respondents to the Forrester/Virtustream survey defined multicloud in several ways, including: leveraging multiple cloud technologies at once (32%); using public cloud in parallel with traditional non-cloud systems (23%); and using multiple public clouds simultaneously for different workloads (14%). In Asia to avoid latency issues Platform all provide information on outages, but reporting make! Everything as a PDF ( TechRepublic ) starting to invest in customizing a SaaS solution to meet organizational business.... 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