One prominent report published in recent times has revealed many interesting insights concerning the growth of multi-cloud management services. According to that report, the multi-cloud management market has a huge potential to flourish and discovered that its market size is expected to grow from USD 1,169.5 million in 2017 to USD 4,492.7 million by 2022 that too with an impressive Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 30.9% during the said period.
Experts are citing various reasons behind this quantum rise famously includes its ability to increase agility, delivering better performance, data sovereignty, avoid vendor-lock in among others. On contrary, many also believe that with the increase in the adoption rate of cloud computing in various industries, multi cloud management market is expected to benefit for the same. Whatever be the reasons behind its stupendous success, it is interesting to know more about this technology. But before deep diving into understanding more about the different exciting facets of this latest innovation, it is vital to first understand what it exactly is and how it is different than hybrid cloud computing.
Multi cloud computing is a strategy to distribute various cloud assets, applications, software and different processes to different cloud-hosting environment. It uses multiple clouds and storage services in a single heterogeneous architecture and many times it is referred to as mix of public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. On the other hand, different components of hybrid cloud typically work together where data and processes tend to intermingle and intersect with each other. Contrarily, in multi-cloud environment, all things remain in its ‘own’ cloud’s silo. Moreover, Hybrid clouds always include private and public cloud while multi-cloud always includes multiple public clouds but can also utilize services of physical and virtual infrastructure including private clouds some times.
Reasons behind its Popularity
Data Sovereignty: One of the biggest factors behind multi cloud’s popularity is its ability to provide Data Sovereignty. In cloud computing, many times large amount of critical data gets stored on the servers and storage device far away from their host country jurisdiction. This creates concerns related to data theft and data manipulation many times. Moreover, stringent data safety laws, certain government regulations, and corporate policies also requires enterprise data to be physically reside in a certain location close to the host country. Multi cloud computing is the answer to all these concerns as it helps organizations to meet these requirements by proving access to multiple IaaS provider’s data centres regions or availability zones close to any company.
Better Performance: Cloud operations of big enterprises consume greater resources and when it get executed through servers and computing devices situated at very far distance, operations efficiency get affected. By selecting an availability zone or data centre region, any organization can locally compute their resources as close as possible and achieve better performance with minimum latency.
Data Redundancy: One of the reasons behind the popularity of using cloud services is its ability to store data remotely and prevent data loss in case of a local machine failure. But what if that clouds server or the storage machine itself got crashed? Multi cloud is way to handle such concerns. Using multi clouds an enterprise can replicate multiple copies on geographically disperse locations and prevent data loss and reduce downtime in case of any catastrophe.
Customize Your Services: There are multiple cloud service providers available in the market which more or less provides the same services but at different terms and condition including cost, efficiency, scalability and data regulation rules. Multi cloud computing empowers the end users to pick different cloud services from different vendors as par their cloud requirement and which better suits than other for a particular task. For example, a certain cloud service handles large number of requests per unit time for small data transfers while some other perform better in handling smaller number of requests per unit time comprising of large data transfers. Therefore, pick those which suit your business requirements the most!
Moreover by using multi cloud service, you can also avoid vendor-lock-in if found any issue with a specific provider and leverage the benefits of other providers.
Common Vendors in Multi-cloud Computing
There is no single vendor that provides multi cloud infrastructure instead it is the amalgamation of services provides by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle.
The Other Side
However, everything good also brings some challenges which may be sour sometimes. When an organization purchase different cloud services from the same providers, discounts come along the way but when a specific service gets purchased, chances of getting discount becomes less. Therefore, it may cost you more on totality for different services. Moreover, to manage such diverse cloud environment requires more and skilled manpower who know all the nitty-gritty of different cloud architectures. Complex deployment and increasing workload are thus the key concerns here. But overall it’s a great technology and it’s going to spread it footprints in the years to come.
