Written by Henri Willmott (Content Manager)
The pandemic has illustrated, that our way of life and the success of the economy is largely dependent on digital infrastructure. The Cloud plays a critical role in storing data, supporting core computer systems and hosting web services. It is an industry that is dominated by a few big players, such as the likes of Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (Amazon Web Services), Alphabet (Google Cloud Platform), Alibaba, Tencent (Chinese market). The cloud is instrumental in facilitating everything from E-Commerce, watching YouTube, storing company data or even when asking Alexa how long to cook your plump succulent roast chicken. Such is the importance of the Cloud that it now accounts for 10% of all technology spending in the world today. As our way of life continues to become more digitalised and so does our dependence on Cloud services and ultimately this increases the severity we experience with any disruption to the Cloud. As a consequence, companies are increasingly looking to spread their bets among multiple cloud service and dividing their digital luggage accordingly. This ultimately reduces a company’s exposure to Cloud outages or security breaches.
For instance, take the Amazon Web Services outage in 2020 which brought large tracks of the internet to a whimpering halt. Companies of all shapes, sizes and functions were left without online services and one company affected was the Washington Post (amusingly owned by Jeff Bezos) and Reddit which relies on the internet for most of its business. This outage resulted in large scale disruption. Although outages are normally regional and dealt with quickly, they can trigger large economic losses and interrupt large swathes of the economy. In the Cloud market (worth $129 billion 2020), AWS had a market share of 32% and as a result, it makes a lot of noise when its services are disrupted. However, companies which use a multi-cloud strategy are less vulnerable to outages and can have greater confidence in their digital operations. Whilst other companies had their wings clipped by the outage, Netflix was able to sidestep the issue. This is because their architecture is designed to spread their data storage across multiple zones and have increased their cloud capacity to take up the slack when needed. As a result, the hordes of popcorn-munching subscribers were still able to stream their favourite Netflix originals for some evening entertainment. However, it is likely that the use of ‘Chaos Monkey’ (A system that emulates a service failure) in Netflix’s cloud strategy also helped them avert the worst of the outage.
So why choose a multi-Cloud strategy? Well simply that it helps increase the robustness of a firm’s system architecture and allows for a business to continue in-spite of network disruption. Additionally, there is plenty of choice in the Cloud market, so it makes sense to explore a multi-angle strategy rather than relying on one provider. It is in essence a form of risk management and ensures that businesses are less likely to experience downtime (A situation which would likely trigger your customer base to complain). Furthermore, not all cloud providers are built the same, they all have different attributes, different tools and their own positives and negatives, this needs to be evaluated for your own unique business but the benefit of having a multi-cloud strategy is that you can pick and choose between the vast amounts of providers and choose the services that suit your business needs. However, it must be said that one of the issues with a multi-cloud strategy is that it does become more complex to track applications and costs. With multiple cloud providers and data storage units it can become harder to track different aspects of your architecture. Equally, with multiple different providers, costs can spiral and ultimately end up burning through precious margins.
Overall, as our society becomes more digitalised it will become more important for companies to assess whether to move to a multi-cloud strategy. Time spent offline is costly and upsets clients. So, as we depend more on the buzzing warehouse dotted across the globe, full to the brim with stacks of energy-sapping data storage units, it would be wise for businesses and governments alike to question how they manage their Cloud. We have all been given the advice ‘don’t leave your eggs in one basket but we should also remember that you shouldn’t lose sight of all your baskets, it could prove costly.