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DAMON CRAWFORD, CLOUD
PLATFORM PRACTICE
DIRECTOR, SIX DEGREES
EDITOR’S QUESTION
Multi-cloud is cloud computing’s
present and future. Today’s
EMEA organisations are using
multiple cloud providers throughout their
infrastructure estates, with a recent survey
by Gartner finding that 81% of respondents
worked with two or more providers. The
reasons? There are plenty, but what it all
comes down to is agility.
At Six Degrees, we see two classes of
multi-cloud adopter: SMEs, who tend to
use one or two cloud providers, and larger
enterprises, who will often use three, four
or more. The distinction really comes down
to scale – of operations, application estate,
geographic spread – as the benefits of
multi-cloud are achievable by almost any
size of organisation.
When we talk to organisations that are
considering their multi-cloud strategy, they
often highlight to us how multi-cloud meets
their sourcing requirements: spreading
commercial risk by reducing vendor lock-in,
achieving appropriate data sovereignty,
meeting regulatory requirements and so on.
Sometimes cloud providers are introduced
through application necessity – if your
organisation wants to deploy PeopleSoft,
for example, it makes sense to host on
Oracle Cloud.
These drivers are all compelling. With public
cloud security continually improving and
deployment and management toolkits
becoming more sophisticated and effective,
the barriers to entry are lower than ever
before. However, we believe the true value of
multi-cloud lies in aligning its inherent agility
to organisational drivers.
Containerisation and contemporary
DevOps methods make application
development faster and more secure,
enabling organisations to deliver real world
benefits to their people and end-users
faster than ever before. These methods use
multi-cloud infrastructures to deliver agile,
cloud-agnostic hosting platforms that are
secure, interconnected and dynamically
scalable. Different elements of individual
applications can be hosted on separate
cloud platforms, each chosen for their
specific capabilities.
Ultimately the success of multi-cloud is a
product of organisations’ desire to host
each workload on the most appropriate
platform – putting round pegs in round
holes. But a balanced view of multi-cloud
should acknowledge the risks it can pose.
Multi-cloud management is complex and
cyberthreats are becoming increasingly
sophisticated. The majority of data
breaches result from end-user error
and introducing multiple clouds to your
infrastructure estate increases the threat
vectors through which cybercriminals can
target your organisation.
An organisation’s multi-cloud journey has
the potential to bring significant benefits
but should always be taken in a manner
that maintains compliance, manages
governance and protects brand value
from cyberthreats.
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