Why be multi-cloud? Addressing unique challenges

Approach offers an effective way to deploy services, which can be consumed without constraints of local networks

By Rajesh Awasthi

In today’s competitive landscape, users of the cloud – not just tech specialists but modern application developers, enterprises and consumers alike – have unique challenges to address. With cloud’s expanding footprint, developers and consumers look for infrastructure- agnostic platforms and serverless capability that can run in a boundary-less manner to ensure the best cost and performance trade-offs. While hyper-scalers offer a developer-friendly environment, there are limitations of vendor lock-ins outside of the primary infrastructure provider, which leads to increased opportunity cost as it affects the agility of the independent software vendors (ISVs) to drive value for the customers.

While there is uptake of open-source services due to the flexibility it offers over hyperscalers, there is the challenge of hassle-free management because of limitations around support structures and managed services, making adoption at scale at enterprise level difficult.

Besides, the remote work environment and the depth of automation in platform services need robust and resilient services like databases, security systems, content delivery, etc. to be available over distributed infrastructure. These need to be beyond the networking constraints of single vendors and with the ability to span clouds, infrastructure, enterprise data centres, and even on-premises.

A multi-cloud approach helps address these challenges and have greater flexibility, agility and seamless connection between different environments across multiple geographies to support country-specific needs. It provides an orchestration layer that can deploy, scale and heal applications in an infrastructure-agnostic way across cloud providers and other hybrid infrastructures. It is an effective way to deploy services that can be consumed without the constraints of local networks in a ubiquitous way and supports intelligent application aware networking capabilities that help route the traffic as per the best cost performance metrics. It offers a move towards standardising and managing open-source services, making them easier to consume across hyperscalers and hybrid multi-cloud vendors.

The writer is head of Global Cloud and Managed Hosting Services, Tata Communications