Internet of Things. VDI. AI. Computer Vision. There are many buzzwords in the world of IT, and one that you surely have heard of by now is Multicloud.

The Cloud trend has been going on for a while now, its main goal being the decentralization of storage and computer power to data centers available over the internet – allowing a lot of improvements, from the ability to share resources, achieving coherence and economies of scale, to the possibly of minimizing upfront costs, running and deploying apps faster, and better management.

But if the cloud itself is relatively straightforward, the way to actually implement it in enterprises is less clear. Up to recently, everything from storage to servers was on-premises, most commonly in a server room at the company’s HQ. Then the trend went to putting everything in the (public) cloud, with less control over resources but with a way simpler management approach.

Lately, the term Hybrid Cloud has been used to describe the combination of private (on-premises) and public cloud to better adapt to the workloads of companies, the whole thing managed by orchestration tools. It is usually the go-to, as it can be scaled and offers more flexibility for the majority of customers. Multicloud, however, could be defined more as a strategy than a service. It’s essentially the use of Hybrid Cloud through multiple providers to meet different requirements.

So why Multicloud?

• Mainly, it allows companies to avoid being locked-in to only one provider’s infrastructure. This way, it’s easy to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions through different vendors, without having to stick to a single solution.
• Then, there is of course the outlook of better performance and compliance. Latency can be minimized with choosing a data center geographically close to the customer, and the choice of multiple providers can make this very easy. As for data governance requirements, a lot of organizations will have to maintain on-premise data pools, requiring a multicloud approach to select conforming vendors.
• Finally, there is the resilience factor. All cloud providers suffer outages from time to time. A multicloud strategy might be more complex to deploy, but will make for better security, failover and disaster recovery.

What are the challenges?

With all its advantages, the multicloud will undoubtedly add some management complexity. It is accepted that no MSP has built a completely transparent, fully integrated cloud solution, so unifying all solutions from all different providers can sometime prove difficult. That being said, more and more orchestration tools are adapting to the increase of multicloud environments, making this developing market more and more easy to manage.

Who are the providers?

• Amazon Web Services is the clear leader in the public cloud, and a major player in IaaS and branching out.
• Microsoft Azure is a close contender, having a strong footprint in enterprises and having been helped by the COVID19 pandemic through the generalized use of Teams tools.
• Google Cloud Platform is still building out its scaling approach but is already ahead in a lot of ways.
• VMware is a clear leader among private cloud providers, vSphere and vCloud Director being the most commonly seen in enterprises.
• With its acquisition of Red Hat, IBM also has a great combo of open-source, support and vertical integration with Cloud Paks.
• Finally, one of the most promising new players is Nutanix. With an exponential grow since its inception in 2009, Nutanix and their Beam platform have proven to be a very effective multicloud environment management system. Their premise is to offer a single OS to unify operations across all of their customer’s clouds, making hybrid architectures a reality and unlocking the full potential of apps and infrastructures.

Present’s offer has been aligned with this latest trend since it emerged, and our team is well-versed into the intricacies of implementing multicloud environments. From our alliance with disruptors like Nutanix, our long-lasting partnership with Microsoft and AWS, and our many cases of VMware deployments, our expertise will help you grow your business. 

We see IT as a business contributor, and multicloud is the next strategy to envision in your hybrid cloud future.