In today’s business world, relying too heavily on any one single solution will always have associated risks. This holds true for technology as well. Enterprises can no longer afford to store and process all their data in a single data center. This is precisely why many companies have turned to cloud solutions. However, even cloud solutions can introduce concentration risks if a company relies on one cloud provider for everything. To mitigate this risk, companies must strategically leverage multiple cloud providers and interconnect them resiliently and with low latency.
The cloud has become indispensable to modern business operations. Companies today rely on hundreds of cloud-based processes, and yet many organizations seem to shy away from the apparent complexity of multi-cloud, instead choosing to source services from a single, large cloud provider. While any cloud will enable flexible infrastructure scaling to match organizational needs, not all clouds offer the same specialized services. Adopting a multi-cloud strategy allows companies to choose the best-inclass services for each specific use case, accelerating processes and maximizing revenue potential. Furthermore, a multicloud approach to business continuity and disaster recovery improves the robustness of these strategies to ensure the 24/7 access to critical data and business processes, irrespective of incidents or outages at individual company locations.
The following four-step process will help you to develop robust strategies for the cloud and protect your critical data flows, ensuring reliable, resilient, and high-performance access to critical data in the cloud—from anywhere and at any time.
1. AVOID CLOUD CONCENTRATION
Most organizations now trust the robust protection provided by cloud
infrastructures. However, while it may seem convenient to consolidate all workloads, databases, and applications in a single cloud environment, strategists and regulators worldwide are becoming increasingly aware of the risks associated with cloud concentration. An exclusive partnership with a single cloud provider can create a single point of failure. In the event of an outage or cyber-attack on that particular cloud, it can lead to significant disruptions, rendering the company unable to continue operating. While there are measures to mitigate this risk within a single cloud environment, such as distributed computing and diversification, taking a multi-cloud approach and focusing on the operational resilience of digital infrastructure provides a more robust solution.
