Want ubiquitous cloud computing with your multi-cloud strategy? Better get a cross-cloud platform.

The global public cloud services market is projected to reach $331.2 billion by 2021—a 54.5%  increase in the next two years. Although this growth speaks to the shift to public clouds from on-premises solutions and private clouds, there are also a significant number of organizations adopting a multi-cloud strategy.

A multi-cloud strategy enables companies to avoid vendor lock-in while capitalizing on the differing services that the major cloud providers offer, especially around security, application migration, and analytics and application development services. 

However, companies won’t realize the real value of adopting multiple clouds until cross-cloud capability exists to enable secure data sharing across cloud providers and regions. Here’s why.

Adopting multiple clouds is advantageous

A multi-cloud strategy enables organizations to negotiate rates with cloud providers and maintain cost management through choice and flexibility. In addition, multi-cloud technology benefits:

  • Enable different business units to use a public cloud that best matches their needs and promotes productivity
  • Capitalize on regional footprints to leverage the best cloud provider by region based on presence, capacity, and services for local teams 
  • Protect against a single cloud provider’s multi-region outage, ensuring uptime and SLA adherence

Present-day limitations thwart multi-cloud success 

Three major challenges exist today that make a multi-cloud strategy incomplete:

  1. Cloud silos are created as soon as data exists in a public cloud. Because each major cloud provider created a unique offering with proprietary APIs for data management, there’s no easy way to copy or share data from cloud to cloud. Making matters worse, it’s hard to find DevOps employees who have the skillset to work in multiple clouds, which often leads to separate cloud teams within an organization (yet another silo).
  2. Cloud services work best when users are in close proximity. As a result, geography plays a role in creating data silos by region, especially for organizations that operate in multiple locations (regions, countries, and continents).
  3. Data portability is a problem for all organizations, including those that use open source technologies and open data formats. Today, there’s no easy way to lift multiple petabytes of data to change clouds, open source or otherwise. 

Cross-cloud data sharing bridges the multi-cloud divide

The true benefits of a multi-cloud strategy will not materialize until data can be shared and replicated across clouds and regions. Fortunately, cross-cloud capability is the answer. Two basic requirements exist for cross-cloud capability:

  1. A cloud-agnostic layer must provide a unified data management platform, which sits on top of each cloud region and all cloud infrastructure regardless of which cloud platforms are used. By providing identical functionality across all cloud platforms, the data management platform enables a cost-effective and seamless method to securely share data.
  2. Data must move anywhere easily, which requires a high-throughput communication “mesh” that enables complete data portability

With cross-cloud capability, organizations will be able to securely share data across regions and cloud accounts while adhering to the same rules of data sharing (data exists locally in a single source where it’s accessed rather than moved). Plus, the platform will make cross-region asynchronous data replication possible without impacting the performance of accessing primary data. 

In short, a cross-cloud capability removes all barriers to data so organizations can:

  • Analyze all data for decision-making, no matter where the data is located
  • Ensure business continuity and disaster recovery through cross-cloud replication
  • Perform account migration without data portability concerns

Global data, at your service

Cross-cloud capability delivers the unified data management platform needed to enable secure data sharing, fully execute multi-cloud strategies, and provide organizations with a single source of truth. By enabling data to move freely, cross-cloud capability delivers on the promise of multi-cloud strategies.

To learn more about cross-cloud capability and how it eliminates cloud silos, download our Why Your Multi-Cloud Strategy Needs a Cross-Cloud Foundation ebook.