Multiple Clouds - Risks and Opportunities

Enterprises access thousands of cloud-based applications every day - what’s the most reliable way to connect to them?

The majority of enterprise adopters of public cloud services use multiple cloud application providers. In fact, according to Gartner, the ten biggest public cloud providers will command, at a minimum, half of the total public cloud market until at least 2023. What are the reasons for this, and how do businesses ensure they can reliably connect to these applications when they need to?

Hundreds of cloud services, one business

A recent Gartner survey of public cloud users discovered that 81% of respondents were working with two or more cloud-based service providers. The reason for this is because of the availability and flexibility of mega-vendors such as OpenText, SalesForce and Oracle. Having access to just one of these vendors enables a company to use hundreds if not, thousands of different solutions.

Access to solutions is just one of the many benefits of using multiple clouds for enterprise-level solutions. There are three primary reasons why enterprises decide to use various cloud-service providers: Sourcing, architecture and governance.

Sourcing

Vendor lock-in can hinder an organisation’s ability to remain agile and flexible in their approach to serving their customers.

Sourcing is thus one of the main benefits of adopting a multi-cloud approach. The desire to create availability, generate performance and secure data sovereignty and regulatory requirements may all be contributing factors that fall under sourcing.

Architecture

In many occasions, the services of the enterprises themselves may require applications that span multiple cloud providers or consume services from multiple clouds. This modular approach to service and solution provision is becoming more common, with best-of-breed applications belonging to different providers.

Governance

To ensure operational control, many enterprises seek to unify the administration and monitoring of their IT systems. By accessing multiple clouds, they can standardise their policies, procedures and processes while sharing tools across an entire organisation. This includes applications that enable cost governance and optimisation.

Challenges for private networks

When it comes to accessing cloud-based services, a company needs to be connected online to offer or use them. This raises the main challenge for some organisations who adopt a multi-cloud approach for their services.

In a bid to boost security and retain control, many organisations are opting to use private networks for their connectivity needs, but this isn’t viable for the multi-cloud services solution approach. We’ve spoken about the limitations for private networks in a different blog post, but for this blog post, it’s worth mentioning that private networks are limited on three major fronts:

Isolation

By definition, cloud services are accessible via the internet, and private networks are... isolated from the internet. Organizations that use a private network or even multiple private networks to exchange data will simply not be able to regularly access their cloud services. One remedy is setting up internet gateways in datacentres or regional headquarters, but these quickly become bottlenecks.

And the security issues that initially led to the choice of a private network for corporate communication can be circumvented by using the internet to access the clouds. There is another, more secure and reliable solution: using cloud ramps.

Scalability

Using a private network is simply not scalable for large organisations. The cost associated with gaining access to the hundreds of existing cloud ramps to connect to thousands of cloud-based applications is simply not economically viable for the long-term.

Complexity

Multiple private networks accessing multiple cloud ramps to multiple cloud-based vendors may find it difficult to solve any errors that occur. Having various parts to a network and thousands of different applications can and will cause issues from time-to-time that will be hard to isolate and contain.

A centralised solution

Organisations may be concerned over the reliability and security of public networks when accessing their cloud-based applications. This seemingly leaves organisations with two choices: they can either sacrifice on their digital security or give up on the flexibility of cloud applications.

However, with Anapaya’s Next-Generation Internet, businesses no longer need to choose. Anapaya’s offers companies a stable, scalable and reliable way to connect. It gives businesses the ability to control how their data travels and which users have access to it. This means it’s secure, reliable and scalable while offering the flexibility of a public network.

If the next generation of internet connectivity sounds interesting to you, consider visiting our solutions page for more information, or contact us today.