What is a Multi-cloud Strategy?
Multi-cloud computing refers to the deliberate use of cloud services from multiple public cloud providers for the same general class of IT solutions or workloads. Multi cloud computing commonly includes both IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) providers.
Most companies manage IT resources in their data centers. Additionally, most companies are leveraging the benefits of the cloud, both, at the same time, which leads to new challenges. A multi-cloud strategy is complex and costly, but improves flexibility considerably.
IT Leaders Balancing Act For Multi-cloud
Do You Have a Deliberate Multi Cloud Strategy?
According to Gartner more than 81% of organizations currently use multiple cloud IaaS and PaaS providers.
While most organizations will eventually be mult cloud, many adopt multiple providers without deliberate planning, creating unnecessary chaos. You may have an Oracle SaaS application & be running Office 365, or may have IaaS for non-Oracle applications on AWS but run Oracle EBS on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Know why even Gartner thinks it is time to add OCI into your cloud assessments.
According to IDC research, by 2022, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs.
Challenges and Benefits of A Multi Cloud Strategy
Organizations that have limited experience with cloud IaaS or PaaS, immediately jumping into a multi cloud implementation often leads to overwhelming, insurmountable complexity that prevents or significantly delays successful cloud adoption. A multi cloud approach has both benefits and drawbacks that must be carefully considered.
| Access More 👍 | Reduce Risk 👍 |
|---|---|
| Technology capabilities | Vendor concentration |
| Cloud Solutions | Negotiation Leverage |
| Customers, suppliers and partners | Lock-in |
| Increases the complexity related to 👎 | Reasons for unplanned multi-cloud organization |
| Management and Governance | Spread across business unit IT cloud decisions |
| Data Dispersion | Shadow IT cloud adoption |
| Vendor Relationships | Mergers and acquisitions of other businesses with different cloud provider |
| Integration | |
| Employee Skills |
Some organizations successfully consolidate from many providers down to just two or three providers in an effort to reduce “cloud sprawl”. However it is usually futile to attempt to consolidate on a single cloud provider if there has been extensive deployment on multiple cloud providers.
Why Add Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to your Multi-Cloud Vendor List for EBS
- No Drastic Changes
Imagine not requiring changes or reengineering your architecture. You can keep your current workloads as they are. Optimize them to scale as per the need.
- Easy Lift And Shift
The migration process can be as easy as backing up your on-premises Oracle applications to Object Storage and then restoring from Object Storage. Everything remains the same and all your customizations will follow.
- Opportunity To Modernize
Yes, you can keep it simple and not change anything in architecture, and yes, simply lift and shift. However, this change can also be an opportunity for modernization. When you use Oracle Database Cloud services, you’re really using Oracle’s Platform as a Service (PaaS).
- Start With Dev, Test, Or Pre-prod
Not ready to move your production environment yet? One risk averse way is to start with your dev, test, and pre-PROD environments. Those environments have to exist somewhere too, and it doesn’t have to be in the same location as your other product environments. This strategy offers low risk for your multi cloud move.
- Start with Disaster Recovery
Another easy way to accomplish a multi cloud strategy is to place disaster recovery resources into a different cloud provider.
- Save Operational Costs Running On-prem
You can save considerable cost running EBS on OCI. A 5 year TCO analysis by Oracle*, found that operating EBS in OCI can be up to 42% -46% less than running it on-premises for 300 to 600 users respectively.
- Azure & OCI Interoperability
For E-Business Suite, customers can use Terraform templates to set up Azure infrastructure and install Oracle applications validated and supported to run in a cross-cloud configuration.
How to Plan Your Multi-cloud Strategy
- Focus IT’s efforts on the primary strategic cloud provider
- Limit approved cloud providers and tier them by level of support.
- While IaaS can be multi-cloud, deep dive into core application specific cloud too.
- Create a cloud workload placement policy.
- Manage concentration risks, not vendor lock-in.
Leverage Expert Observability and Management Tools for Multi-Cloud Success
While you may be using observability and management platforms from any provider, it is important to assess what differentiation Oracle brings to the table.
OCI Observability and Management Platform is a comprehensive set of Oracle Cloud services that enable visibility and insight across multi-platform cloud-native and traditional technology, whether deployed in multi-cloud (OCI, AWS or Azure) or on-premises environments, with broad, standards-based ecosystem support. It consists of the industry’s broadest management portfolio of integrated Logging and Logging Analytics, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Infrastructure Monitoring, Database Management, Operations Insights and Service Connector Hub.
Added to this is the “Oracle on Oracle” advantages of always current and out-of-the-box coverage and deep knowledge and insights into OCI, Autonomous, Database, Exadata and Oracle Applications and the ability to harvest Oracle Enterprise Manager data for forecasting and capacity planning for Oracle Database and Exadata. Customers also have a choice of deployment for these cloud native services on cloud (OCI) or on-premises (Dedicated Region C@C).
OCI Observability and Management Platform for Ease of Multi-cloud Environment
Leveraging Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform has the following advantages for multi cloud, hybrid cloud & on-premise environments:
- A unified view of the software stacks.
- Diagnostics for cloud and traditional technologies deployed in multiple environments.
- Built-in machine learning to detect anomalies and enable remediation.
- A vendor agnostic approach with interoperability with Slack, Grafana, PagerDuty and Twilio built-in.
- Services to monitor applications, database, logs, performance and operations.
Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform will instrument Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with one click for EBS, but will also be able to provide visibility into public clouds including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Conclusion
Gartner now recommends IT leaders to consider OCI in their next cloud assessment for Oracle and Non-Oracle workloads. Gartner also recommends that, in order to avoid complexity, it is best to leverage Oracle Cloud MSP/MSEs who are certified to consult, build, migrate, and manage your cloud on OCI. Successfully served 1100 enterprises globally with Oracle solutions, you can be assured of your cloud strategy success with IT Convergence.
