Use Multiple Cloud Providers for Redundancy
Not too long ago, organizations would wrestle with the opportunities and negative consequences of cloud technology. Back then, many had qualms about placing valuable data in a faraway storage location that, when jeopardized, could potentially cause a major operational disturbance. Similar doubts are surfacing about the cloud now. Its intangible nature obviously means that there’s no hardware to monitor 24/7.
Faced with such doubts, the logical conclusion is spread the risk either over several cloud providers, off-cloud infrastructure, or do both. With SLAs and redundancy being offered by most cloud providers today, such a move may be unnecessary. However, we ignore historical events at our peril. Remember the Amazon EC2 outage last year?
One cloud still poses risks
Several cloud providers claim to have an all-in-one package that’s simple yet scalable, powerful, and easy to install. However, such providers don’t really suggest distributing cloud-associated risks over multiple solutions, instead offering a combination of private and public clouds – or hybrid clouds. At the end of the day, it’s still one and the same cloud they’re offering you – just with an extra location.
But apart from hedging outage risks, there are other reasons why your organization should opt for multi-cloud providers. For one, you’ll benefit from geographical diversity, being served from different data centers found in separate locations. For another, you can choose which provider will equip you with the best infrastructure for specific workloads. Think of cloud providers as suppliers. Keep your independence and prevent supplier lock-ins by sustaining good relationships with many providers. This way, you’ll be able to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each and choose which of them will be able to cater to your requirements. Then there are also legal issues such as country laws stating that data originating from a specific country (i.e. Germany and the UK) should remain within it.
Multi-cloud platforms are becoming the trend
The 2012 State of Cloud Computing research conducted by InformationWeek reveals that a staggering 73% of survey respondents are utilizing several cloud providers. With IT teams of most organizations now supporting different applications, hardware infrastructure, and operating systems, this is probably not surprising.
Having multiple cloud providers has a downside too
Happily, there are many deployment platforms that seek to facilitate multiple clouds. But even with such platforms in place, you still need to fully understand the requirements of each and every cloud provider you choose.
While the main objective of a multi-cloud solution is to minimize risk, complexity is inevitably increased. You might double, triple, or greatly multiply the configurations and changes needing to be constantly monitored – depending on how many cloud providers you want. More difficult still is the need to deploy your system across different cloud platforms, and thus pay closer attention to specific requirements of a particular stack.
If your organization is unable to contend with the added complexities of a multiple-cloud approach, the reliability of cloud applications will be jeopardized. Performance and security issues may arise from failure to properly identify and track changing configurations specific to cloud platforms.
Use multiple cloud providers to achieve redundancy
Redundancy in applications, data, and systems in the cloud simply cannot be attained via a single cloud provider. Several cloud providers are needed to achieve true redundancy, entailing greater monitoring of servers, bandwidth, application performance, configuration, and more. There are services that will help you look after cloud deployments and guide your infrastructure plans for specific organizational requirements. Investigation of such services will best ensure that your multi-cloud vendor works well for you.
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About the Guest Author
Rodolfo Lentejas, Jr. is a fulltime freelance writer based in Toronto. He is the founder of the PostSckrippt, a growing online writing business dedicated to producing top quality, original and fresh content. To know more about him, please visit www.postsckrippt.ca. Like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.
