The trend of organisations moving to the cloud has seen considerable growth since the pandemic began. According to a Gartner report, more than 85% of global organisations will run containerised applications in production by 2025, from 35% in 2019. The growth in the cloud footprint and the associated complexities have also made organisations increasingly move towards a multi-cloud setup, says Narinder Kumar, COO and co-founder, To The New, a Noida-based digital technology company.

According to the latest HashiCorp’s State of Cloud Strategy Survey, 76% of companies have adopted multi-cloud into their digital infrastructure, as a multi-cloud strategy addresses the limitations of using a single cloud service provider.

“Organisations adopt the strategy to benefit from the best-in-class features of different service providers,” says Kumar. This helps businesses prevent any hyperscaler lock-in by assisting them to reap benefits across cost arbitrage and choosing providers for specific sets of services. “Pivoting towards a multi-cloud model can help improve performance and bring cost savings and better scalability while adopting a more vendor-neutral approach.”

But this also leads to challenges, says Kumar. The main drawbacks of a migration to multi-cloud are cost and complexity issues. While the strategy helps entities in several ways, making sure the pieces fit together can be tricky. This is because every cloud vendor has its own architecture and processes for managing its environment.

“To make the transition from legacy IT infrastructure to multi-cloud environments, organisations must ensure that various cloud services fit together, as if in a puzzle,” says Kumar. According to him, all multi-cloud teams should be vigilant to the following aspects to be successful:

(i) Managing applications consistently irrespective of where they are deployed; (ii) Enabling build, migration, and execution of applications anywhere; (iii) Moving applications between public Clouds without refactoring; (iv) Ensuring application and data security; (v) Enabling IT support for easier team collaboration; (vi) Providing a pathway for seamless migration to new cloud environments.

With the help of multi-cloud deployment, organisations get the best of both worlds – they get to save time by managing all their data on multiple clouds and get the benefits of using a single, centralised management infrastructure across all clouds. When done right, multi-cloud management can help an organisation ensure scalable and secure IT and operational efficiency.