Multicloud

What is Multicloud?

Multicloud, also referred to as Multi Cloud, is an IT environment that uses two or more cloud computing services from different cloud vendors in a single environment. Multicloud can encompass public and hybrid clouds and is generally used to minimize the risk of committing to a single cloud environment. That’s because different cloud services vary from different providers with some being better for certain tasks such as processing large datasets than others. Today, more and more organizations are pursuing multicloud strategies for flexibility, agility, and cost reasons.

Why is Multicloud Important?

There’s an old adage about not putting all of your eggs in one basket to mitigate the risk of having no options left if they all break in a single accident. Enterprises that choose a multicloud strategy are adhering to that idea by spreading workloads and services across providers in an effort to prevent outages and gain best-in-class performance and capabilities.

Providers of cloud services may be any of the following:

• Hyperscalers (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform)
• National or regional public cloud service providers that ensure data sovereignty
• Industry public cloud service providers (e.g., healthcare or financial services clouds)
• Enterprises with cloud services on-premises and extending to clouds from many vendors and locations (aka hybrid cloud)

Cloud providers innovate in different areas and at different rates. No matter which providers you choose, a multicloud strategy allows you to adopt best-fit services from different cloud providers based on their particular strengths. For example, some cloud platforms specialize in offering integrated artificial intelligence (AI) services while others may have better integration with existing environments such as on-prem.

Organizations are eager to embrace a multicloud strategy for:

• Cost — Having the choice of multiple cloud environments helps you avoid vendor lock-in and negotiate and manage costs more effectively.
• Best-of-breed technology — You get your pick of the right cloud service for the right job with a multicloud strategy.
• Scalability — Multicloud allows you to scale your capacity up or down based on demand without being limited to a single provider.
• Lower risk — If one provider goes down, you can switch to another to avoid disruption.
• Regulatory compliance — Different cloud vendors possess different certifications for different industry and government requirements, such as HIPAA, GDPR, or PCI, streamlining compliance.

Yet adopting a multicloud strategy is still challenging for too many organizations because it requires navigating many different vendor relationships, cost structures for different solutions, and mastering different data management tools, APIs, and user interfaces.

Is it Multicloud or Multi Cloud?

Multicloud, which is also often called Multi Cloud, refers to the same strategy. It’s when enterprises spread workloads and services across cloud providers—which can include their own private cloud—to minimize downtime while achieving the best capabilities at the highest performance.

What Is a Multicloud Environment?

Whether all cloud services are delivered by public cloud providers or an organization has a combination of services from public cloud providers and its own enterprise (a.k.a. a hybrid cloud), the organization has a multicloud environment.

What Is the Difference Between Multicloud and Hybrid Cloud?

A hybrid cloud strategy is often considered a type of multicloud strategy. A hybrid cloud, however, is distinct because it requires organizations to be using a service from at least one public cloud provider and one on-prem cloud. In contrast, a multicloud strategy requires organizations to use at least two cloud services from public cloud providers.

What Is Multicloud Deployment?

Multicloud deployment is the process of putting workloads in private and public clouds. These deployed multicloud workloads can benefit from a web-scale, multicloud data management platform to protect and manage data across many clouds.

Is Multicloud Reliable?

Yes, multicloud is reliable because it’s the job of hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to maintain availability. Reliability can be further enhanced by enabling applications to run on multiple clouds and failover from one cloud to another should an outage occur.

What Is a Multicloud Example?

Some examples of multicloud environments are organizations leveraging SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com and Adobe Creative Cloud as well as AWS for on-demand infrastructure and Cohesity for Backup as a Service.

What Is the Difference Between Cloud and Hybrid?

Cloud is typically used to describe an organization’s use of cloud-based application services or workload deployments to public cloud infrastructure off-site, such as hyperscalers AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or any number of regional service providers. Hybrid cloud is a type of cloud computing environment where organizations deploy workloads to cloud infrastructure on-premises and at the same time take advantage of SaaS or cloud application services hosted on off-site infrastructure from a public cloud provider (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.).

What Is Hybrid Multicloud?

Organizations taking advantage of hybrid multicloud are typically using three or more clouds in day-to-day operations. An example of a hybrid multicloud organization is one that is:

• Deploying workloads or cloud services on-premises
• Adopting SaaS applications or services that run on public clouds (e.g., Microsoft 365 or Salesforce) 
• Migrating applications or workloads to public clouds (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba, or a regional or industry cloud provider) for efficiency or agility
• Using public cloud infrastructure for data management or protection services such as Backup as a Service

What Is the Difference Between Public/Private and Hybrid Cloud Computing?

Public/private and hybrid cloud computing are the same cloud strategy. Enterprises that spread workloads and services across cloud providers and their own on-prem cloud services operate a hybrid cloud.

A successful hybrid cloud strategy goes beyond combining public/private components. Teams with them look to leverage the same platform and UI to create seamless hybrid operations. A key element of this is the concept of on-prem resources and public clouds remaining distinct elements but being “bound together,” which helps teams achieve the best of both worlds in terms of deployment benefits with public and private, or hybrid, clouds.

Cohesity and the Multicloud

The Cohesity Helios multicloud data platform eliminates cloud silos, unifying data sources and services across different vendors, technologies, and locations.

Understanding all of the advantages multicloud and hybrid IT environments offer your enterprise, Cohesity was built for multicloud strategies. The Cohesity multicloud data platform includes native integration with public clouds that helps you take advantage of their scalability and a pay-as-you-go model for multiple use cases — from backup to disaster recovery — all while keeping control of your data. For example, with Cohesity Helios, you can deploy a Cohesity cluster in the public cloud to protect cloud-native apps and enable replication from on-prem for hybrid cloud or you can subscribe to Cohesity Data Management as a Service SaaS offerings to manage your multicloud data.

These Cohesity attributes are critical to realizing your data management vision for multicloud:

• Cloud-native, globally efficient — Enjoy the scale and ease of cloud with world-class global efficiency that reduces your complexity, cost, and risk and with the choice of software or SaaS.
• One platform, universal protection — Quickly unify and protect all of your data scattered across hybrid and multicloud environments in Cohesity’s single, hyperscale data platform.
• Manage less, innovate more — Simplify and automate data management with global visibility and provide direct access to data for third-party apps for security, insights, and innovation.

The Cohesity platform is offered as SaaS, or software that runs natively on public clouds to protect your cloud-native workloads and when deployed on-prem, it provides simple connectivity to public clouds to extend your data center infrastructure for long-term retention, tiering, disaster recovery, and agile dev/test. 

Built-in Cohesity capabilities give you the flexibility to leverage multicloud to back up and restore anything from on-prem to multicloud data sources to SaaS apps and data such as Microsoft 365. And the confidence to stop relying on tape while tiering data — hot, warm, and cold — using policies most efficiently. 

Because the primary reason for adopting a multicloud strategy is choice, Cohesity delivers the ultimate data management platform for flexibility. Cohesity features the widest range of choices about where you deploy — across multiple clouds, hybrid cloud, on-prem, and SaaS — and as part of a managed or pay-as-you-grow consumption model.