Have you heard about the recent UniSuper and Google Cloud accident?
This recent incident impacting a company like that serves as a stark reminder of the potential risks associated with relying solely on a single cloud provider and highlights the importance of . To address these challenges, many organizations are now turning to the concept of the hybrid and multi-cloud. By combining the benefits of blending multiple cloud providers with on-premises infrastructure, businesses can mitigate the risks associated with relying on a single cloud provider and unlock additional benefits such as improved scalability, reliability, and flexibility. Hybrid- and multi-cloud approaches, both separately and combined, offer strategic solutions that not only enhance data resilience, but ensure businesses are better equipped to handle unforeseen disruptions as well. In this blog, we will explore the advantages that hybrid- and multi-cloud environments provide to companies, including enhanced resilience, improved security, greater scalability, and cost efficiency.
Mitigating Downtime and Data Loss
Hybrid cloud offers businesses the ability to follow the 3-2-1-0-0 rule by creating redundant backups and failover mechanisms across multiple environments. The recent UniSuper data outage serves as an example of how data can be lost even when you have backups in the same cloud. Having a secondary environment, whether it is a private cloud or another public cloud provider, is crucial to ensuring business continuity and minimizing data loss. By distributing data and workloads across different environments, businesses can significantly mitigate the risks associated with relying solely on a single cloud provider.
Enhancing Security and Compliance
Enhancing security and compliance is a top priority for businesses, and cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure offer comprehensive security features that can help you achieve these goals. Public clouds have extensive security controls in place to protect customer data, like encryption options for data in transit and at rest. This includes data immutability, identity and access management tools, and thorough network security measures. By leveraging these secure and compliant cloud platforms, businesses can have confidence that their data is protected and that they can meet specific industry requirements, whether it be healthcare, finance, or other sectors with stringent data protection regulations.
Achieving Greater Scalability and Agility
Businesses gain the flexibility to quickly scale up or down based on demand when they use a hybrid- or multi-cloud environment. This is particularly beneficial for businesses with seasonal fluctuations or unpredictable workloads. By leveraging the scalability of the public cloud for peak periods and combining it with the control and performance of the private cloud, businesses can effortlessly adapt to changing market conditions and ensure their infrastructure can efficiently handle any workload.
Optimizing Costs
One of the significant advantages of the hybrid-/multi-cloud is the ability to strategically allocate workloads to the most cost-effective environment. Businesses can store data in a public cloud, taking advantage of its scalability and cost-efficiency, all while keeping the private cloud for greater control and security. This approach can result in significant cost savings on hardware, software, and IT staff, since businesses only need to allocate resources where they are most needed.
Five Benefits of a Hybrid Multi-loud Infrastructure
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses are increasingly adopting hybrid multi-cloud infrastructures to enhance their operational efficiency and resilience. This approach combines the strengths of multiple cloud providers with on-premises infrastructure, which offers a strategic solution to various challenges. By leveraging hybrid multi-cloud environments, organizations can achieve enhanced resilience, improved security and compliance, greater scalability and flexibility, increased cost efficiency, and foster innovation and agility. In the following sections, we will delve into these key benefits and illustrate how they can transform your IT strategy and drive business success.
Enhanced Resilience
By distributing workloads across multiple cloud providers and on-premises infrastructures, businesses can ensure high availability and disaster recovery (DR), thus minimizing the risk of downtime and data loss. Implementing data replication strategies across different environments guarantees that critical data remains accessible even during a cloud provider outage, providing a robust safety net against potential failures.
Improved Security and Compliance
Leveraging the security features of multiple cloud providers, such as encryption, identity management, and network security, enhances overall security posture and protects sensitive data from breaches and cyberthreats. Additionally, using a hybrid multi-cloud strategy allows businesses to meet specific regulatory requirements more effectively, which ensures compliance with industry standards through various compliance certifications offered by different cloud providers.
Greater Scalability and Flexibility
Hybrid multi-cloud environments enable businesses to dynamically scale resources up or down based on demand, which is particularly useful for handling seasonal spikes or unexpected surges in workload. By combining the scalability of public and private clouds with the control of on-premises clouds, businesses can optimize resource allocation to ensure efficient infrastructure usage and the flexibility to adapt to changing needs.
Cost Efficiency
Businesses can strategically allocate workloads to the most cost-effective environment, such as storing non-sensitive data in a cost-efficient public cloud while keeping sensitive data in a secure private cloud. This approach leads to significant savings on hardware, software, and IT staff, since resources are allocated where they are most needed, which reduces reliance on a single cloud provider and optimizes overall operational costs.
Innovation and Agility
Utilizing multiple cloud providers gives businesses access to a broader range of services and technologies, which fosters innovation and the adoption of cutting-edge solutions. Hybrid multi-cloud environments support rapid deployment of applications and services, allowing businesses to respond quickly to market changes and customer demands, thereby enhancing their agility and competitive edge.
Future-Proofing Your Infrastructure
The hybrid multi-cloud is a forward-thinking approach that allows businesses to adapt to dynamic technology trends while balancing the critical objectives behind running a profitable business. By implementing a successful hybrid-/multi-cloud strategy, businesses are well-prepared for future advancements and can easily integrate new technologies or services as they emerge. This future-proof approach ensures that businesses can continuously optimize their IT infrastructure and stay ahead of the curve.
Fortunately, Unisuper was able to maintain business continuity during the recent Google Cloud outage due to their multi-cloud strategy.
While there are undeniable and numerous benefits to adopting a hybrid- or multi-cloud approach, it doesn’t come without its challenges. These include concerns surrounding security, complex environments, and the intricacies of managing such a complex environment. This is where Veeam comes in.
With Veeam Data Platform and Veeam ONE, businesses can gain centralized visibility into their complex environments through a unified platform. This unified view of a hybrid multi-cloud environment simplifies the management of strategic resource protection across diverse platforms, resulting in high levels of data availability and security. By using the encryption and immutability features provided by AWS and Microsoft, we enable our customers to achieve resilient data protection, regardless of where their data resides. Additionally, our automation capabilities streamline the backup process, which frees up valuable time for businesses to focus on strategic initiatives.