The business benefits of a multi-cloud strategy

When deciding between a hybrid or multi-cloud approach, the choice hinges on the location of your business’s non-cloud resources. If it’s feasible and preferable to have an on-site private cloud due to specific security or configuration needs, then opting for a hybrid strategy is the way forward.

However, if this isn’t a critical requirement, a multi-cloud approach still offers advantages in terms of disaster resilience, compliance management, and flexibility. It provides these benefits without the added complexity and infrastructure investment associated with a hybrid cloud setup. For most small and mid-sized businesses, a multi-cloud approach strikes the right balance, delivering the needed flexibility and reliability.

Embracing a multi-cloud approach offers you the freedom to manage your applications directly, enabling control over critical factors like cost, uptime, latency, and downtime, all of which significantly influence your customers’ experience. This strategy helps you steer clear of vendor lock-in, empowering you to discover the cloud products and services that offer the most value.

Of companies adopting multi-cloud strategies, data sovereignty (41%) and cost optimization (40%) emerge as the leading drivers. Additionally, factors like business agility and innovation (30%), accessing best-of-breed cloud services (25%), and concerns about vendor lock-in (25%) play crucial roles in shaping these strategies.

Your organization might find a multi-cloud strategy suitable if you prioritize:

• Enhanced flexibility and avoidance of vendor lock-in

• Ensured high availability to prevent website downtime

• Robust data protection and risk mitigation planning

• Optimal latency and load times for customers

• Competitive pricing across cloud providers

• Consistent access to network performance improvements

• Adherence to region-specific compliance regulations

These requirements often demand a broader range of options and capabilities than a single-cloud strategy can provide.

Multi-cloud architectures, integrating public, private, and hybrid cloud services, represent a strategic investment approach well-suited for various businesses, particularly mid-market and enterprise-level organizations. By strategically allocating cloud management tasks across multiple providers, multi-cloud adoption can enhance efficiency, leverage economies of scale, and fortify the performance of your cloud infrastructure.

To maximize the benefits of multi-cloud architecture, it’s crucial to efficiently monitor, secure, and manage your workloads across all environments through a unified interface, similar to handling them on a single platform. Some of these multi-cloud management platforms include CloudZero AnyCost, Terraform, Lacework, and Cloudify among others.

“One problem with multi-cloud setups is the cost and complexity of making them work together. Many providers make it prohibitively expensive to move data out of their clouds. In such cases, multi-cloud setups are not truly multi-cloud, as people are unable to take advantage of what each cloud offers. This makes simplicity, support, documentation and an open platform important, particularly for startups”, said Yancey Spruill, DigitalOcean.

As you expand your use of multiple cloud providers, the complexity of managing your environments grows. Different public cloud vendors offer not only distinct features but also diverse tools, SLAs, and APIs for cloud service management. While managing each environment separately is possible, it often strains IT teams due to time and resource constraints.

Ideally, multi-cloud management capabilities should be seamlessly integrated into your cloud provider’s products and solutions. This integration enables you to gain comprehensive visibility across all cloud environments, track costs and usage, enforce consistent security controls and policies, and facilitate workload migration to enhance availability.

“Most people in the cloud are multi-cloud. As businesses retain more customers, become more diversified, and grow globally, they need more services and multi-cloud is often the most efficient method to scale”, said Yancey Spruill, CEO, DigitalOcean.

“While DigitalOcean plans to add more tools to the platform in the coming year(s) that are helpful to early-stage companies, we actually embrace a multi-cloud approach, believing it’s part of our core value of simplicity. If you think about legacy tech, these business models have evolved to embrace complexity and lock people into a hardware/software relationship. Cloud has enabled people to be more flexible”, he added.

Each cloud provider boasts its own set of advantages and drawbacks. By integrating multiple providers with DigitalOcean’s scalability and flexibility, businesses can harness the distinctive strengths of each.

DigitalOcean’s developer focus, cost-efficiency, global reach, and robust ecosystem make it a suitable choice for businesses implementing a multi-cloud strategy. By leveraging DigitalOcean in a multi-cloud architecture, you can realize the benefits of flexibility, risk mitigation, optimized costs, and improved performance while ensuring your business remains resilient and innovative.

This strategy is often employed to efficiently allocate computing resources and mitigate the risk of data loss or downtime. Small businesses, in particular, benefit from a multi-cloud setup as it empowers them to tailor costs and services by selecting specialized cloud providers that align with their precise requirements. This approach is preferable to relying on a single, larger cloud provider that may encompass services beyond the scope of a small business’s needs.

To explore DigitalOcean’s array of cloud services and understand how they can enhance your business, please take a closer look at our product suite here.