What Does Google Promise Businesses with Multicloud Solutions?
Disparate Clouds, Common Infrastructure: Understanding Multicloud
The ultimate destination for end-to-end digital transformation: Multicloud
Today, many businesses, small, medium or large, come into contact with cloud platforms. Even businesses that don’t run heavy digital workloads are reaping the benefits of the cloud with their e-commerce platforms or payment systems in their physical stores. As scale grows, needs diverge, and some businesses choose to use solutions from multiple providers. In this article, we discuss this situation, the concept of multi-cloud and the multicloud solutions offered by Google.
Do you use enterprise resource planning (ERP) software? Do you use mobile devices and computers to follow your logistics processes? Do you have an e-commerce platform as well as physical stores?
Do you offer contactless payment in your stores? If your answer to any of these easily reproducible questions is “yes,” it means you’re in contact with a cloud system, regardless of your scale or headcount.
Cloud platforms are at the heart of digital transformation today and have already replaced traditional, on-premises data centers. So much so that as the scales grow, the needs differ. Some businesses are adopting multiple clouds—a multi-cloud approach—to improve IT and application performance and manage costs.
When it comes to cloud service providers, technology giants such as Google, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Alibaba come to mind. Although each offers different variations of various common services, they differ from each other in their use and strengths. On the other hand, the data centers that these providers are located in different parts of the world also affect the technology provider choices of the enterprises. In such cases, businesses may choose Google for some of their services, AWS for other applications, or Alibaba Cloud when they start to implement their expansion strategy for the Asian market.
In this article, we will talk about the definition of multi-cloud, its advantages and disadvantages, and in which situations it is necessary for a business.
What is multicloud?
According to Google, multi-cloud is the use of multiple cloud environments for computing needs. The multi-cloud architecture, which considers the private clouds dedicated to companies and the public clouds that everyone can use, allows businesses to choose solutions from multiple providers according to their needs. For example, a business that uses a public cloud service from a vendor that its customers trust as their primary source of communication can position another private cloud as a backup to minimize the risk of disruption and avoid being tied to the vendor’s initiative.
As digital workloads proliferate and complexity increase, businesses are increasingly adopting multi-cloud approaches. According to the State of Cloud Strategy 2022 study by HashiCorp , 9 out of 10 businesses believe the multi-cloud approach “works.” Noting that the multi-cloud approach has become the new normal, the report shows that 81% of enterprises have chosen multi-cloud. IT professionals believe that more than 61% of their workloads will run in multi-cloud within two years.
What is the difference between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud?
Although the concepts of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud refer to infrastructures that integrate more than one cloud, these two concepts differ in the types of cloud infrastructure they contain. Hybrid cloud infrastructure brings together two or more different types of clouds. Multi-cloud brings together different clouds of the same type.
Advantages and disadvantages of multi-cloud
The benefits of multi-cloud architecture, whose advantages intersect with the hybrid cloud approach to some extent, can be summarized in three items:
● High availability: Multi-cloud provides protection against security threats and outages for an organization’s services and data storage. When one cloud is not used, other clouds can run applications to provide uninterrupted service to users.
● Flexibility: Multi-cloud allows organizations to choose according to their specific business needs, financial situation and geographic location. In this way, businesses have the flexibility to avoid the situation of being tied to a vendor.
Cost benefits: Multi-cloud enables organizations to optimally control their budgets, weigh operational spending, and leverage public cloud providers that compete on price. Without depending on a single vendor, it can choose providers that offer the most suitable solutions at the best price.
When it comes to disadvantages, topics such as complexity, labor need and security are mentioned.
Complexity: Businesses that take a multi-cloud approach to their critical infrastructure need to master multiple cloud platforms. This makes cloud transformation processes more complex.
● Workforce need: Finding and hiring expert software developers and system architects needed for a multi-cloud approach is not as easy as it seems. The supply-demand imbalance in qualified professionals stands out as one of the problems that the IT sector has been struggling with for a long time. The HashiCorp report also states that the biggest obstacle to multi-cloud migration is the lack of skilled labor.
Security: The complexity of the multi-cloud approach creates a greater target for attack by malicious actors. Ensuring security, encryption, and compliance across multiple cloud environments is critical.
Which businesses are multicloud suitable for and which aren’t?
While what we’ve described so far is a bit technical, we assume that consolidating the pros and cons will shape your thinking about multi-cloud a bit. In this part of the article, we list several items for IT professionals and administrators who have not yet come to a clear conclusion about whether they need multi-cloud or not.
Why take a multi-cloud approach?
● To avoid being tied to a single cloud service provider and to flexibly make changes if you are not satisfied with the service, without starting the cloud transformation from scratch
● To optimize your cloud computing costs, use your resources in the most efficient way, and switch to providers that offer better prices when you need more resources
● Move your business-critical workloads to the more secure private cloud and your other workloads to the public cloud; To have the advantage of moving from public to private cloud in cyber attack situations such as DDoS
● To comply with data retention and processing regulations required by the country where your headquarters are located
● To take advantage of the technological strengths of different providers
Who shouldn’t rush to multi-cloud migration?
● Those without the technical background and IT workforce to deal with the complexity that is an inevitable consequence of multi-cloud
● Those who do not have the financial means to make the investments that can make up this workforce
● Those who can get more discounted prices for large-scale services requested from a single service provider
● Those who do not have the competence to detect and repair security vulnerabilities that will be the result of multi-cloud
Introducing Google Cloud’s multicloud solutions
Google’s multi-cloud solutions in its solution portfolio in 2021 offer the ability to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions while minimizing vendor loyalty. Businesses can also respond to regulatory requirements using Google Cloud’s solutions that support the multi-cloud approach. Google contributes to the flexibility for companies to migrate, build, and optimize their applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Global IT, which has completed more than 3,300 projects for more than 16 years and pioneered the process of moving more than 700 businesses to the cloud, uses Google solutions for the digital transformation needs of many companies, especially retail, as the oldest and only Google Cloud Premier business partner in Turkey.
Global IT enables businesses to diversify their revenue sources with e-commerce with Google Cloud’s customized solutions for the retail sector. By making it easier for them to manage their data centers, it transforms businesses into customer-centric organizations while enabling operational advancement.
If you want to discover what Global IT can do for your business with Google Cloud solutions, such as Hepsiburada, N11, Getir, Sefamerve, Zen, Vivense, which stand out with their references that touch different points of retail, you can fill out the contact form at the bottom of this page.
