The outages of cloud platforms, especially that of AWS, make big news because along with its own platform it affects many other popular services like Netflix, Robinhood, Twitter etc. The number of services getting affected may vary each time. But the fact is that these outages bring to fore the key questions for enterprise customers if they can rely on or if they can put all their eggs in one cloud platform?

The answer to this question is not quite straightforward. The outage of your cloud platform should not be the trigger to accelerate your multi-cloud strategy, something else should. On the face of it, even if you feel that you should not pour all your dependencies into one cloud platform, each cloud vendor will have a solution for you. i.e. for different availability zones, in case of such outages. Which means the cloud vendors are trying to assure you that there are ways you can overcome the outages. Then there are technology companies who are advocating that deploying on multi-cloud is not really easy. The efforts and manageability overheads are way too much, and it isn’t worth going though all the trouble just to address the possibility of outages happening in the near future.

In our opinion, this single question is not the only one that you should be considering for your multi-cloud strategy. There are far more important questions that you should be addressing or asking: 

• Freedom
• Choice 
• Control 
• Transformation

So what should your Multi-cloud strategy really address? Of course, it leaps in when the eventual outage happens or when you need to do disaster recovery on the cloud. But more importantly, it provides you and your team the freedom of choosing the right-fit technologies, the freedom of choosing competitive pricing, getting access to a variety of vendors, retaining your control over costs, and most importantly, and in faster go-live of your digital transformation goals. 

While a multi-cloud strategy is beyond just multi-vendor strategy, a multi-vendor approach gives you as an enterprise consumer the freedom, choice and control – and the same should be applied for cloud platform vendors. But, transformation should always be the core objective of your multi-cloud strategy.

Multi-cloud platforms have to be used to upgrade the way we look at business. Cloud itself is bringing about such a transformation today for businesses, and a multi-cloud plan helps take it to the next level. One reference for how a multi-cloud platform helps you better is – it allows you to create regionally aligned, more locally focused business & product strategies. Because, then it helps you deploy resources and introduce products more easily and systematically. Allowing businesses to choose appropriate platforms for each geography while leveraging their specific benefits, is a boon for organizations that are regionally spread out or that are global in nature. Multi-cloud is their best friend honestly. 

Another key aspect of a multi-cloud strategy is that it allows you to hire and retain talent. Apart from the technology aspect, one of the critical challenges faced by even the top enterprises is attracting the right talent and making them stay on. A multi-cloud approach gives you more choices to hire the right talent and scale, as needed.

While I personally may be a big advocate of a pertinent multi-cloud strategy, I am fully aware of the complexities that come along with it, and why addressing them is so important. A multi-cloud approach may be relatively new to the industry, but if you are fully convinced about its importance, you should be well-prepared to handle its intricacies. Get the right platform, join hands with the right supporting partners/vendors and bring on the best technologies that seem to fit your needs. 

Another important aspect which is a ‘must have’ for a multi-cloud approach is Infrastructure-as-a-code. This is for my next article perhaps! Till then, I am sure, you would keep bumping into new finds and merits of the multi-cloud approach. Have a lovely year end!