Multi-Cloud to SuperCloud and when did this become an option? 

The concept of multi-cloud (MC) became popular back in 2013. It started when companies began to use more SaaS providers for their services, such as supply chain management, relations management, HR and many more.  

With the option of MC now available, it has given companies the ability to adopt and utilize a range of cloud providers all from one platform. Multiples of public, private or edge clouds can be mixed to the formula that best suits your companies’ requirements.  

If you are looking to adopt multi-cloud into your business, we hope you find this article useful. Here we will try to outline some of the common mistakes or misconceptions that can easily be made before you look to start your journey.  

Why you should not migrate before you have a clearly defined plan.  

Adopting multi-cloud Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) into your business or utilising these across a project will always need a well thought out plan. There are many different CSP’s out there and on the face of it, they all offer the same benefits; cost savings, better flexibility and of course, scalability without the need to extend or maintain any legacy hardware. These are all important factors to any business model reliant on IT infrastructure and makes the “the want” move to the cloud even more appealing. However, you should not rush and adopt the first CSP you research.  

Before you look to make the move to the cloud, you will need to firstly understand what your goals are and what you want to accomplish, after you have gathered your findings, you can then start to look at what standards are going to be important for each layer of your business, there is little consistency to across the different CSP’s, be as thorough as you can afford to be. 

Most CSP’s will display similarities between their DevSecOps, infrastructure, management, governance, cost, and app layers. Some of these will share more similarities than others, the right level research will help your business narrow down the right provider for you. This will help to build the base of your companies “Good migration plan.”    

What if you want your workloads to be portable?   

Having the ability and the means to be flexible is one of the most advantageous aspects you will find when incorporating multi-cloud into your organisation. For example, with the ever-changing world, it is important to have the ability to meet new legal compliance requirements, for any business this can be an expensive exercise, as can company acquisitions. You can help reduce this cost and the workload when you have the advantage of portability with multi-cloud CSP’s. This of course may not apply to your organisation, by doing your research you may find that there is one singular CSP that will cover all your needs without having to adopt multi-cloud.  

Before adopting multi-cloud, you will need to think about what requirements your platform of tomorrow will need.   

Before you look to adopt multi-cloud, best practice would be to consider what level of flexibility your company is going to need in the future, whether this is a month, a year, or 5 years from now. Every company wants to grow. You will want to look at where you want to get to and then break down what you will need to help support this and is it going to be crucial to your growth to expand to a new cloud provider? If so then you will need to start to think about which CSP will you use to support your different departments and the apps they use, what resources will you need to assign to the move, who will need access to the various CSP’s, and the products and services held within.  

This strategy may also not be suitable for your organisation so again, you may want to explore a best-of-breed provider that will allow you to expand comfortably within, therefore no need for multi-cloud planning.  

Plan around those that will be using the environment.   

Your team and staff members are what drive your company, look after your customers, and help your organisation reach the goals you have as a business. The same people will also touch on areas when you expand to multi-cloud, so bear in mind your developer experience when you think about standardisation in your new environment.  

Many people are afraid of or do not like change but with the correct plan in place, the only changes that may noticeable will be the increased performance and the extra open space in the office where the physical servers used to be. You can rebuild your environment as-is or fully upgrade, these are choices that you may want to consider when planning user experience and interface when expanding.  

For many companies, multi-cloud is the way forward and it is not a matter of if, but when this will be a part of everyday operations. The correct research and plan are the most important part of considering expanding into the cloud and furthermore into multi-cloud.  

What’s next now that you have adopted multi-cloud into your organisation?   

You have done it! Your research has highlighted which CSP is best for you and helped you decide on where to go with your multi-cloud decision. You have executed your best made plan and now operate, day-to-day in your new environment. This is a huge step for any company! What is your next evolutionary step?   

Have you ever heard of “SuperCloud”? A SuperCloud is a combination of CSP’s which can include on prem and at a bare minimum, one hyperscale cloud. This allows you to utilise the underlying services of hyperscale and CSP’s through some very clever software. In time, the idea is for developers to publish anywhere, over multiple clouds, within the SuperCloud through one PaaS layer. This will save time and resources. Another surprising fact of the dubbed SuperCloud is that it is available to anyone and everyone with an IT infrastructure, across all industries who wish to adopt and take advantage of the new benefits offered by this architecture.     

The benefits of transitioning into a SuperCloud environment are:   

• Improved security and value add   
• Reduced cost   
• Access to almost all cloud platforms through a single PaaS  
• User interface is much simpler as you do not need to know how the code runs.      
• Avoid data moving and not been able to find it again without specialist knowledge of all systems  
• Application functionality can be improved  
• With the reduction of airgaps between clouds, this will reduce your companies’ risk of cyber-attack. And the list goes on.  

SuperCloud’s are the next evolutionary step in the cloud, we look forward to seeing where we all go next!  

Thank you for taking the time to read this article, if your company is looking to make the transition to the cloud, whether to a single CSP or Multi-cloud platform, please reach out to us and we will help you achieve your goals through our streamlined methodology and powerful practitioners.