In today’s digital world, it has become essential for businesses to leverage multi-cloud technology to stay ahead of their ever-growing competition. Multi-cloud technology is far more convenient and offers superior performance than traditional on-premise infrastructure.
A 2021 report by Statista shows that about 90% of large enterprises have already adopted multi-cloud because of its various benefits. With time, the number of users for multi-cloud technology is only going to increase. According to Gartner, 80% of businesses leveraging the cloud will adopt a multi-cloud approach by the end of 2022.
There is no doubt that the multi-cloud approach offers significant advantages to organizations. In this blog, we will address some common challenges that organizations can face while integrating data on multi-cloud. Before getting into the integration challenges, let’s know what multi-cloud technology is.
What is Multi-Cloud?
Multi-cloud refers to a cloud strategy where multiple cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services(AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure are leveraged to host an organization’s data, applications, or infrastructure in a single environment.
A multi-cloud strategy must not be confused with a hybrid-cloud strategy. In a hybrid-cloud strategy, resources are shared between on-premise infrastructure and single cloud infrastructure. In contrast, the multi-cloud strategy relies on using more than one cloud provider.
Benefits of Multi-Cloud
Enterprises choosing multi-cloud experience numerous advantages. Here is the list of the benefits of utilizing multi-cloud:
● No Reliance on a Single Vendor
Several cloud vendors in the market offer unique features, but a single cloud provider doesn’t need to cater to all your needs. With a multi-cloud strategy, you can choose the best services from multiple vendors for specific requirements.
● Increased Performance
The extended network of a multi-cloud solution can develop connections that improve your applications’ response time and user experience. It also offers businesses to choose cloud providers depending on the location, which can further increase the application performance.
● Data Recovery
A multi-cloud strategy allows organizations to replicate data on two or more cloud platforms, ensuring data recovery even if any of the platforms abruptly fails due to some technical difficulties. By chance, if one of the cloud platforms is facing downtime, all of its data can be transported to another platform instantaneously.
● Flexibility and Scalability
As the volume of data increases, it becomes difficult for an organization with on-premise infrastructure to manage it effectively. Multi-cloud integration is an ideal solution for enterprises that are looking to store and process data, as they can scale their storage requirements depending on their demand.
Challenges of Multi-Cloud Integration
To incorporate multi-cloud technology into your organization, you might need to mitigate these challenges during the transformation process.
● Growing Prices: As the demand for the cloud platform is increasing exponentially, their prices are also rising. This can be a big hurdle for small and mid-sized enterprises while adapting to the multi-cloud strategy.
● Architectural Complexity: Migration from on-premise infrastructure to a cloud infrastructure causes organizations to make drastic changes in their existing architecture. They must completely redesign their on-premise infrastructure to run applications on cloud platforms.
● Data Governance: Data Governance refers to data management that ensures the high availability, integrity, and usability of an organization’s data. Integrating a multi-cloud infrastructure involves massive data exchange among the cloud platforms. Governing these exchanges on a multi-cloud infrastructure can be an overwhelming task for an IT team.
● Role Management: Each cloud platform has its portal, APIs, and unique processes for managing its environment. Hence, enterprises might have to hire experts for managing the multi-cloud infrastructure and ensure that the company’s IT environment is being secured and utilized to its full potential. It is also possible that employees within the organization may see a change in their roles and responsibility.
How To Overcome Multi-Cloud Integration Challenges
Here are some of the best practices that you can adopt to overcome the challenges faced while multi-cloud data integration:
● Before moving forward with the integration process, a proper plan should be drafted that addresses concerns of monitoring, administration, resources, and the management required to make the transition.
● An enterprise can perform pre-migration tests to foresee obstacles they might face during the actual migration process. This process will also provide a clear picture of the costs and time required in the multi-cloud data integration process.
● There are several integration platforms available online that allow the different cloud platforms to interact seamlessly with each other, making it efficient for organizations to migrate from on-premise to cloud infrastructure. It also makes the process of data exchange among them efficient.
● Usage of the latest automation techniques can ease the burden of data governance, and the IT team will be able to focus on more complex tasks. It is also one of the ways to optimize the costs involved in the process.
Conclusion
With the benefits offered by a multi-cloud strategy, it has become essential for enterprises to migrate towards multi-clout technology. There are a lot of moving parts involved in the implementation of this strategy, which can give rise to many issues related to data governance, cost, etc.
Besides the solutions mentioned above, outsourcing is another way to address multi-cloud data integration challenges. You can hire an IT firm that has a team of experts to offer cloud migration solutions.
Mindfire Solutions is one of the top IT service providers offering cost-effective cloud migration services. Also, Mindfire Solutions can take care of your data migration, website migration, severe migrations, and a lot more. We have assembled a team of people who have relevant industry experience and are passionate about their jobs.
Visit Mindfire Solutions to know more about us.