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In today’s world, the majority of enterprises have more than one cloud provider, with more data than ever in the cloud, particularly given the rise of work-from-anywhere and ubiquitous customer access. Research shows that over .

A multi-cloud approach combines the strengths of different cloud architectures from various providers, enabling each cloud type to focus on specialised tasks. While hybrid cloud relies on seamless interconnectivity, multi-cloud operates and manages data, processes, and workloads independently.

Advantages of a multi-cloud approach

Having multiple cloud providers has many benefits, including helping enterprises avoid vendor lock-in, manage risk, and enhance the resilience of their operations. It also gives enterprises the flexibility to choose the best-suited services for their specific needs to optimise performance. For global enterprises, engaging with multiple providers allows them to distribute their applications and data across different locations, ensuring better redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities.

This approach not only ensures a tailored fit for each company but also enhances agility, which in turn facilitates faster solution development, reduces time to market, and cultivates an environment conducive to innovation.

• The agility inherent in multi-cloud enables a rapid deployment process, from the identification of business needs to the implementation of secure solutions, thereby ensuring a quicker time to market.
• Having the option to choose from multiple cloud providers can result in significant cost efficiencies, particularly in scenarios that demand high storage costs.
• The inherent redundancy in multi-cloud architecture ensures flexibility and availability during downtime by spreading the risk across global providers.
• Multi-cloud strategies support technology portability, offering platform-agnostic solutions hosted on the provider of choice and enabling seamless migration between providers for increased flexibility and simplified management.

Challenges in integrating multiple cloud platforms        

However, using multiple cloud providers presents several challenges, such as higher costs and increased complexity when it comes to integration, with each cloud platform typically having its own unique interfaces, APIs, security protocols, and management tools. Meanwhile, ensuring seamless data integration and interoperability across different cloud environments can be a significant challenge. While multi-cloud can potentially offer cost optimisation opportunities, it also leads to increased complexities in tracking and managing costs across different providers.

In addition, enterprises using traditional network architecture for their cloud platforms are likely to face performance challenges, since paths are not optimised to offer the requisite performance and reliability. Meanwhile, those using internet VPNs will encounter difficulties, as internet VPNs typically provide limited site-to-site bandwidth, unpredictable performance, and high cloud egress costs.

Security and performance now critical elements of multi-cloud connectivity

Mission-critical applications are moving to the cloud, leading to higher demand from enterprises for multi-cloud connectivity services. For example, the number of enterprises globally using software-defined cloud interconnects (SDCI) services to connect to public cloud service providers is expected .  A Gartner report confirms this trend, estimating that enterprise spending on private connections to the cloud will reach US$3.6 billion by 2026.

This makes security and performance a vital element for enterprises when it comes to multi-cloud connectivity. However, there are several challenges with traditional cloud connect services, such as complexity in managing multi-cloud connectivity, as well as a lack of traffic visibility, flexibility, and agility.

Many enterprises are still undergoing their cloud journey and trying to navigate these challenges. Tata Communications has addressed this issue head-on with , connecting an enterprise’s data centres, branches, public clouds, private cloud and third-party network on-demand, providing customers with greater agility to connect their users, branches, data centres, clouds and partners across the globe. It is an SDCI service built on virtual connection and virtual network functions and provides on-demand, real-time and scalable multi cloud connectivity.

This removes the complexity of sourcing and managing connections and hardware. Enterprises can streamline management and improve flexibility. At the same time, the tool enables end-to-end predictable performance from branch to cloud, improving application performance and response time.

It also reduces egress cost by using dedicated connections from the edge, leading to around 25% cost savings, and enables complete visibility into the network architecture for greater control and agility.

IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect in action

A recent example was when Tata Communications helped a leading airline migrate its applications to the public cloud. This brought about the need to transition from the existing on-premises architecture to a multi-cloud environment. The migration involved transferring workloads, including network and security components, across three different cloud platforms. It needed to ensure a high-performance connection, so users and travel agents could still access the systems. Moreover, it had to be scalable and at the same time simplify the network architecture.

The airline leveraged Tata Communications IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect to migrate the applications securely and enable a seamless transition of the IT infrastructure to public cloud platforms. It addressed the challenges of private connectivity and enabled a direct connection to their global distribution systems—all while simplifying the architecture of the cloud environment. It also minimised the cost associated with public clouds and enhanced the performance in connection with critical business partners.

As the world rapidly moves towards internet-based and cloud-based infrastructure with mission-critical applications hosted on multiple clouds, enterprises are increasingly using multiple cloud providers for their applications. Therefore, having a solution which makes connecting to any cloud seamless – with performance and security at the heart of it – has become mission critical for enterprises.