One reason that enterprises are attracted to the cloud is its flexibility. With the ability to rapidly deploy infrastructure through a web console or prewritten script, enterprises can react quickly to new business requirements by rolling out new infrastructure in minutes or hours instead of days and weeks with zero capital expenditure, including the option to backtrack and to shut them down on a whim.
Buoyed by the growing maturity of cloud capabilities, it is hence unsurprising that complex multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments are expected to dominate the enterprise1. Indeed, more than two in three (69%) respondents from a study2 by analyst firm 451 Research said they planned to have some type of multi-cloud environment by 2019.
There are advantages that multi-cloud offers that are not found with a monolithic cloud deployment. Foremost among them is the ability to mitigate the risk of data loss or downtime stemming from localised cloud failures or outages. By not putting all the eggs in one basket, enterprises are hence able to increase the reliability of their cloud infrastructure at essentially no added cost.
Another consideration of a multi-cloud deployment is how some clouds are better suited than others at specific tasks. For instance, a software-as-a-cloud (SaaS) solution may offer better cost efficiency without the hassle and manpower overheads of manually deploying and configuring the same system on a preferred infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud.