Hedging your bets on cloud providers

With cloud usage maturing and companies relying more and more on cloud computing to drive innovation and keep the business running, the focus is turning to how companies can implement the ideal cloud provider strategy. After all, there’s a lot of choice in cloud service providers out there. For many organisations, a dual-provider cloud strategy makes sense.

Why should you choose a dual-provider cloud strategy?  

The IT department is not new to deploying dual vendor strategies. Indeed, avoiding vendor lock-in has been something that most IT organisations have been striving to do for years in order to ensure reliability, access new innovations and improve negotiating power. Now, as cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and Google reach saturation levels, there’s a good case for employing a dual-provider strategy for cloud services as well. 

With the threat of cloud outages, organisations are opting more and more frequently for a dual provider cloud strategy with one provider for production cloud and another for Disaster Recovery.

But, it’s not just downtime concerns that are the driving factor behind companies having a dual-provider cloud strategy. When deploying new innovations in the form of new apps in the cloud, having a cloud provider that can work with you to customise the cloud hosting service required, offer flexible pricing options and even help you achieve the necessary compliance requirements for the service, is of paramount importance. Choosing the right cloud strategy can be game-changing to many organisations, and the “hands off” approach of many cloud providers is often not sufficient.

Some organisations are using a variety of cloud providers for different use cases that require more flexibility and more visibility around billing and performance than they get from their existing provider. Furthermore, organisations are using a different cloud provider for disaster-recovery-as-a-service, to ensure failover in the event on an outage. With the changing landscape of cloud providers and the diverse IaaS use cases that many organisations have, it just makes sense to diversify and avoid having all your eggs in one cloud basket.

The cloud computing market is evolving fast and it’s difficult for anyone to predict how it will continue to evolve. What is becoming increasingly obvious though is that the cloud is becoming a vital part of a company’s overall IT infrastructure and there will always be value in having a true partnership with your cloud service provider. Furthermore the decision to engage in a multi-cloud strategy is one which should undergo great consideration and is important to drive the benefits of cloud computing throughout your organisation.