Multi-cloud offers flexibility, cost savings, and security and vendor lock-in risks. Learn how to confidently navigate a multi-cloud strategy and mitigate risks using Nutanix’s approach.
Modern-day organisations are challenged to transition from legacy IT systems to the new era of multi-cloud environments that can completely transform the business and deliver competitive advantages, placing them in leadership positions.
A multi-cloud strategy offers a range of valuable business benefits, including flexibility, scalability, increased efficiencies, lowered costs, and access to cutting-edge technologies. But with great power comes great responsibility (and risk). Enterprises navigating these dynamic environments need an approach that avoids the potential pitfalls of multiple clouds. Here’s how to navigate the multi-cloud world with confidence:
Identifying Multi-cloud Challenges:
- Security: Segregated services across multiple clouds increase the attack surface, exposing high ransomware threats and various malicious vulnerabilities.
- Vendor Lock-in: Over-reliance on a single vendor/cloud provider can limit flexibility and inflate costs.
- Data Residency and Compliance: Data storage and privacy regulations vary by region.
- Integration Complexity: Managing and integrating applications across multiple cloud platforms can be challenging.
- Skills shortage: Acquiring high-caliber talent and skills to run multi-cloud environments remains a challenge in the IT market.
Based on Nutanix’s latest Enterprise Cloud Index 2024 research published in March this year, the main findings were:
- 90% of ECI respondents take a “cloud smart” approach to their infrastructure strategy – leveraging each application’s best environment (e.g., data center, public cloud, edge). No wonder that hybrid and multi-cloud environments have become the de facto infrastructure standard.
- Over 80% of organisations believe hybrid IT environments are most beneficial to their ability to manage applications and data.
- 78% of organisations plan to invest more in security strategies for multi-cloud.
- 37% indicated that their AI-based applications require the modernisation that multi-cloud offerings can grant them if a standard cloud operating model governs all challenges.
De-risking the Multi-cloud Strategy
By adopting a proactive risk mitigation approach, organisations can harness the full potential of the multi-cloud world while minimising potential disruptions. Remember, the journey to a secure multi-cloud environment is a continuous process, requiring ongoing adaptation and governance. De-risking involves the following steps:
- Build the standard cloud operating model: Build one that caters to international hyper-scalers and local cloud providers while operating on-prem environments.
- Embrace portability: Choose a cloud operating model that relies on open standards and easy data migration capabilities. This reduces vendor lock-in and simplifies future cloud transitions.
- Cloud cost management: Implement FinOps-enabled cost optimisation and governance model to automate cloud expenditure visibility resource usage and identify opportunities for cost savings across providers.
- Multi-cloud disaster recovery (DR): Develop a comprehensive automated DR runbook that accounts for outages or disruptions in your cloud environments while ensuring seamless business continuity.
- Invest in the right expertise: Upskill your IT team and consider partnering with cloud security specialists.
Also Read: Strategies for Ensuring Flexibility and Control in the Hybrid Cloud Era
The Nutanix Multi-Cloud Risk Mitigation Practice
Nutanix is a company focused on helping customers with a cloud experience that assures modernisation, simplicity, data-centricity, and portability.
Nutanix cloud platform is built with the secret sauce of its industry-leading hyper-converged infrastructure technologies, based on AI/ Big Data distributed architecture, offering customers:
- A consistent and unified single platform
- AI-based innovation to deliver the best experience for each hosted application/ data
- 53% more efficient multi-cloud management and orchestration
- 60% faster time-to-value, utilising various cloud options without service disruption
- E2E best-in-class security, governance, and compliance for apps/ data.
- Unmatched ease of use that grants faster skillset and talent acquisition
- Portability of licenses and workloads between cloud options or on-prem, assuring no vendor/cloud lock-in
