Security on Multi Cloud ☁️

Security is the biggest concern for IT professionals considering, or already using, multi-cloud strategies.

Managing cloud deployments has led many to look for external support, 43 percent of surveyed IT leaders have turned to a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to overcome issues with their multi-cloud strategy.46 percent are attracted by the prospect of faster time to adoption, and 44 percent by the ability to tap into skills that are unavailable or lacking internally.

Amazon Web Services (55 percent) and Microsoft Azure (54 percent) are the most common areas of public cloud expertise within businesses. US businesses are best placed internally to work with AWS, compared to UK firms where Microsoft Azure edges ahead.

Around two-thirds of IT leaders (67 percent) say that COVID-19 either didn’t disrupt, or had even accelerated, their plans to move to a multi-cloud environment. Yet economic uncertainty has made this a difficult road for some businesses. Nearly a fifth (19 percent) of respondents say that COVID-19 has slowed their adoption of multi-cloud as priorities have changed and investment redirected to other areas.

Complex deployments like multi-cloud present a wide array of potential challenges. Before a migration, businesses need to undertake a thorough audit of their existing applications and put together a comprehensive roadmap to the cloud. This planning will ensure that fundamentals like security, user experience and cost optimization do not fall by the wayside in the journey to the cloud.

Multi-cloud is an attractive option for businesses looking for a flexible, resilient cloud strategy. It offers firms a route to the best of both worlds: receiving all the benefits of different cloud providers and protecting the business against vendor lock-in.

When set up in multi-cloud, containers are an ideal way to start innovating in the cloud quickly porting and scaling up applications to deliver for the business. And for businesses seeking even more location flexibility for their public cloud infrastructure, distributed cloud may well be the future.