How leveraging the multi-cloud flexibility can help you innovate, build successful machine learning projects, and meet your business agility needs. Easy strategies to hybrid cloud agility and flexibility.
The multi-cloud has become a significant technological trend. The reason is that leveraging the multi-cloud can accelerates the digital transformation process while reinforcing individual independence to better safeguard the capacity for innovation. For organizations, it is not only a question of choosing the right technology but making a strong commitment to the multi-cloud for their machine learning and analytics projects.
Although plenty of voices are singing the praises of multi-cloud infrastructures, they tend to skip over what really matters. We will summarize the benefits that are frequently bandied around – while giving the low-down on the real story.
How leveraging the multi-cloud can offer a harmonized approach to address an organization’s real-life requirements
Yes, leveraging the multi-cloud provides companies with the agility that they need to combine different cloud resources. But not only public cloud resources. This is the first myth: multi-cloud is not exclusively to public clouds.
On the contrary, the upside with multi-cloud is that it steps neatly around the whole “public cloud vs. private cloud’ issue and instead offers a harmonized approach that addresses the requirements that organizations are facing in real life. Multi-cloud is not a defensive measure against Amazon Cloud Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, but a strategic choice allowing companies to keep the resources on premises for security and performance reasons, as well as to safeguard their innovations – we will come back to this.
How can organizations better protect their data and improve service availability by leveraging the multi-cloud
The ability to sprawl across several clouds existed before the word “multi-cloud” was even coined. In fact, what makes leveraging the multi-cloud so powerful is its ability to painlessly and seamlessly manage the overhead involved in spreading resources over public and private clouds. Multi-cloud strategies bring an increase in agility, not capacity. Ultimately, they aim to simplify and accelerate the use of resources from across multiple infrastructures.
That is why multi-cloud does not mean that software companies are restricted to executing a virtual machine in any cloud infrastructure. The idea is to exploit the native characteristics of the different cloud infrastructures to ensure real integration with cloud providers.
With a multi-cloud strategy, organizations can better protect their data and improve service availability. As recent events have shown, cloud infrastructures are not immune to faults or outages. Using different clouds can clearly improve your organization’s resilience.
What are the limitations of hard-tying data, applications, and infrastructures together?
The aim with a multi-cloud infrastructure is to prevent the strong links that can tie data, applications, and infrastructures together. It should not be forgotten that the main cloud providers started off with an infrastructure before offering higher level services. As is often the case in computing, ramping up the number of application layers has led to even greater complexity and forged strong bonds between the different layers.
Would you let your electric utility supply your electricity and make all your electrical appliances? Despite the obvious answer, many companies have nevertheless chosen to use a single cloud service provider to not only host their data and applications, but also “power” them from end to end. So let’s take a look how leveraging the multi-cloud can provide benefits to your company.
How leveraging the multi-cloud brings an increase in agility, not just capacity
Is it serious, doctor? Am I going to die? Everything depends on how critical your application assets are in your strategy. In today’s economies, cloud infrastructures have become our new power stations. The question of just how dependent we are on such providers is especially important, since each one has the finances and technology to turn into a competitor overnight. We cannot and should not turn a blind eye to this prospect, especially in those sectors where they have already developed business interests. Leveraging the multi-cloud improves an organization’s agility without being tied too strongly to any one infrastructure and without becoming overly reliant on any one supplier.
What are the criteria that define a real multi-cloud
Leveraging the multi-cloud improves your organization’s agility but without being tied too strongly to any one infrastructure and becoming overly reliant on any one supplier. You would be justified for asking exactly what the criteria are for a “real” multi-cloud platform. We have identified at least three criteria:
The ability to serve a flexible multi-tenant model
Three scenarios apply: Using shared resources, a single-tenant model, or dedicated resources. In the first scenario, you’re a co-tenant. In the second, you’re a single tenant. In the third scenario you are basically the landlord.
Horizontal, fine-grained, and seamless scalability
To scale as needed and to easily create multiple instances for your different machine learning and analytics projects, and the different components of your infrastructure.
Shorter provisioning times
Simply put, if it’s taking you days to add new resources to your cloud environment, you’re clearly not working on a multi-cloud platform like the ForePaaS Platform that can manage cloud resources automatically for you.
For more articles on cloud infrastructure, data, analytics, machine learning, and data science, follow Paul Sinaï on Towards Data Science.
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