The Urgent Need for Multi-cloud to Keep Business Running 24/7—Now Easier with Even Bigger Benefits!

By Jamil Ahmed, Distinguished Engineer at Solace

Today’s fast-paced ‘to the second’ operating environment requires organisations, whether operating locally or nationally, across one or many industries, to supply round-the-clock services, be “always available”, and operating in real-time. There is an urgent need for adopting a multi-cloud strategy, but it isn’t an easy journey without the correct underlying architecture in place.

Seeking an architecture that will function across all cloud providers or hyperscalers is imperative. A more agile, real-time business infrastructure that can not only manage what goes where, but the ability to comply with changing regulations, is essential for businesses to reap the real business value that a multi-cloud strategy can provide.

Regulators and Hyperscalers alike are driving the multi-cloud movement

Already, we have the basics for multi-cloud in place. There is now a healthy market of cloud offerings thanks to the multiple hyperscalers, with regulators further encouraging competition amongst them. Just this year, AWS announced that it will allow customers to transfer their data out of its ecosystem to another cloud provider with no fees imposed. Shortly after, Google announced similar plans for data transfer outside of GCP, with Microsoft now expected to lay out an approach for Azure.

These decisions follow provisions set out in the European Data Act which came into force in January, designed to promote competition by allowing cloud customers to switch providers more easily. Eliminating egress fees for data transfers to other cloud providers is a positive step towards open cloud ecosystems, aligning perfectly with the EU and UK regulations pushing for greater interoperability.

While it’s clear big moves are being made by large cloud providers, becoming truly multi-cloud will require bodies such as the CMA or EU in a GDPR-like format to really make a wave in the industry and help remove vendor lock-ins. There are no immediate plans in place, but businesses must make sure they are ready to react quickly to ensure they benefit from the cost and flexibility advantages.

“Always On” must mean business as usual

Cloud outages have only highlighted the vulnerability of one cloud deployment. Even the largest cloud hosts – Google, AWS, Microsoft – suffer from outages, and having all your digital eggs in one cloud basket leaves businesses at risk of serious failure. It’s about building a fault tolerance, a buffer that enables your business to always remain operational. It will come down to how the workload is transferred or handled by another cloud provider.

Concerns about outages shuttering business operations are for good reason, with Oxford Economics calculating that downtime costs Global 2000 companies $400 billion each year, with each hour costing the business an average of $540,000.

The implications are huge. Take the recent CrowdStrike outage as an example that affected organisations such as financial services, airlines & operators, and healthcare organisations that rely on being operational 24/7. It highlighted the general IT dependency today’s businesses have, but if we dig a little deeper, then we see the impact of cloud-specific outages.

Cloud outages that could have been avoided – a case in point

Large global businesses need to be accessible for customers no matter the time of day. Consider the Australian industry fund, UniSuper, when Google Cloud accidentally deleted the private cloud account of the Australian pension fund worth $125 billion. It left over half a million users without access to their accounts for a week – a fiasco that was only resolved by a single backup on another cloud provider, but the outage duration could have been minimised completely if it was truly multi-cloud all the time.

When a business is multi-cloud, the end user should never even be able to detect that a failure has occurred within the business. Any service downtime is avoided, as the failing is shielded by another cloud host. It’s this level of availability that remains at large a driver for multi-cloud deployment – if one server fails, businesses need the assurance that another cloud server will automatically pick up the slack and ensure the business itself is not adversely affected.

Apps that say they are multi-cloud friendly are usually as friendly as a cornered ferret

For many, multi-cloud is a plan for the future, with 97% of IT leaders intending to expand their cloud systems further by using one or more clouds in their systems. But currently, too many businesses are preoccupied at the first hurdle – setting up their first cloud deployment. Only when businesses have this first adoption in place, they want to focus on ensuring apps are friendly at multi-cloud deployment level. This is how the risk exposure begins.

In a perfect storm, all clouds would be the same and shifting masses of information, data, and workloads from one cloud provider to another may be a simple endeavour. But the reality is much different. Large-scale organisations have various barriers to overcome when deploying tech stacks across multiple platforms. As explained by Gartner, there are nuances when it comes to features on offer by each provider, such as the operating system, programming language etc. and they range from minor to almost complete rewrites of the code.

The next challenge comes with ensuring the applications within the various clouds can “talk” to each other to ensure the seamless exchange of information. The solution lies in the underlying architecture that can seamlessly connect these different cloud providers together and enable the transfer of data-movement in real-time.

Enter the event mesh.

Managing processes in real-time across multi-clouds, no matter when or where or how

Between dealing with regulatory compliance changes and avoiding single provider lock-ins, many organisations have had no choice but to rethink their IT infrastructures and adapt to the complications of global operations. Being able to connect data in motion between various clouds and in real-time is a non-negotiable for global enterprises, and it’s where an event mesh can provide the interoperability businesses desperately need.

Within an event mesh, every transaction, business moment, or piece of data is an event – no matter where, and no matter what cloud the user is operating on. Businesses using an event-driven architecture have a powerful built-in event mesh which addresses this same challenge of “data in motion” by spanning all clouds and even on-prem locations as one seamless data movement layer.

That means that these businesses can now dynamically shift workloads across clouds by leveraging even relatively small and short-lived differences in separate cloud packaging, pricing, and performance advantages. Supported by its global deployment of event brokers within the event mesh, businesses can be confident that their underlying tech stack ensures a multi-region, multi-cloud agnostic approach.

Cost is always a consideration, but multi-cloud also brings agility, flexibility, and new levels of innovation

With today’s demanding consumer expectations around responsiveness and availability, the businesses that are the most responsive and available will out-compete the businesses that are not. A multi-cloud approach keeps them agile and available, even when it comes to operating in multiple regions.

For example, some applications will perform better across different clouds, so choose cloud deployments that are suitable for simple data storage versus those suitable for heavy AI-dependent apps. Some, of course, won’t work at all in geographic regions where sovereign data rules may apply. Having a multi-cloud approach will allow organisations to pick and mix according to their business needs, which in turn creates added flexibility for workload placement. For instance, allowing businesses to move applications to the lowest-cost environment and build leverage for when it’s time for cloud contract negotiations.

The benefits of multi-cloud go one step further, when trying to ensure best-of -breed cloud deployments for applications. It’s key to remember that although cloud operators all offer services in the cloud, not all services are equal in what they offer. By not locking in with a single vendor, organisations can arbitrage cloud services to get the best service for individual business needs. Being able to access the latest new technologies, not only makes innovating easier, but allows organisations to take advantage of promotional, merchandising, or product search capabilities from hyperscalers that in turn can accelerate revenue for the business.

All aboard for the journey to multi-cloud – it could be sooner than you think, and the benefits more than you could imagine

We’ve seen first-hand the results of widescale IT outages, and the need for businesses to be prepared for regulations to come into force at any time. But the benefits to every organisation of a multi-cloud strategy are far greater than the security of avoiding vendor lock in.

With hyperscalers now offering more of an open shop to showcase their services, businesses can pick and mix their cloud services allowing them to increase business flexibility by moving applications to lower-cost or more appropriate environments to achieve the business benefits they are looking for.

And when supported by an underlying event mesh, they can be safe in the knowledge that their multi-cloud deployment ensures the smooth exchange of data in real-time, protecting operations should one cloud host experience an outage.

Above all else, multi-cloud keeps their operations always available, a non-negotiable for businesses operating in today’s connected world.