Analysis by Tom Keane: Harnessing the Power of Multi-Cloud

According to Tom Keane, the more we analyze the benefits of edge computing, the clearer it becomes why businesses should consider a move to – or the adoption of – platforms, services, and digital infrastructures that can deliver those benefits. At the same time, however, business leaders mustn’t lose sight of the fact that technological advancements and their real-life use cases do not occur in a vacuum. What this means is that new business models, tech innovations, and cutting-edge service offerings should be looked at together so that the highest-impact force multipliers available can be adopted.

Much of the success of today’s edge offerings is due to advancements made in the cloud computing space. Without access to computing capabilities that are fast, flexible, reliable, and scalable, it would not likely have been possible to build new business models and IT infrastructures designed to deliver the real-time, low latency, and highly available functionalities that edge devices, sensors, systems, and applications provide.

That being said, Tom Keane believes that an exploration of not just cloud but multi-cloud strategies can be of immense benefit to businesses and users. Business leaders should look at the available cloud and multi-cloud offerings and how they may integrate with a given set of edge capabilities to create value and/or solve real-world challenges. Below are points to consider and critical success factors based on Tom Keane’s vast experience as a long-time leader at Azure – Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.

Tom Keane Breaks Down Multi-Cloud Strategies

As the name suggests, a multi-cloud strategy involves the use of two or more different cloud computing services. This can refer to the use of multiple SaaS (Software as a Service) or PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings, although it is typically used to mean a combination of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings. Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud are relevant examples of this.

Multi-cloud adoption today is primarily being driven by redundancy and vendor lock-in concerns. However, evolving business and technical goals and strategies are also linked to the rise in multi-cloud growth. For example, some cloud offerings are more price-competitive than others, while others may be faster or come with more capacity or features. Others may be better suited for particular environments, industries, or regions.

Furthermore, many organizations pursue multi-cloud strategies due to data privacy and sovereignty concerns. The evolving landscape of data privacy, protection, sovereignty, and localization laws means many types of enterprise data must be physically located in specific locations or borders. Multi-cloud strategies can be used to help organizations meet those mandates by leveraging the availability and expertise and offerings of multiple IaaS providers across different data center regions and/or availability zones. Such a setup also provides businesses with the ability to have cloud data and relevant computing resources residing as close as possible to end users, thereby optimizing performance and minimizing latency.