Cloud technology is entering the era of the multi-cloud. When using multiple clouds supported by various cloud providers, organizations can reap the best features of each, thereby making their cloud infrastructure far more flexible.

During his opening keynote at Dell Technologies World Conference in May, CEO Michael Dell expressed his views on multi-clouds as the future of cloud technology. According to Dell, multi-cloud ecosystems will harness the combined power of edge computing with artificial intelligence (AI) to “process and deliver data across 5G networks in highly automated environments.” 

Multi-cloud technology is already expanding rapidly. According to Dell, 90 percent of his company’s customers currently have both on-premise and public cloud environments, while 75 percent are using three to four different clouds. However, he also noted that multi-cloud technology is creating larger amounts of data and security challenges in the process.

“Anything you want to do in today’s world, from [decentralized finance] to blockchain to metaverse, and autonomous vehicles, and robotics, smart everythings, based exploration, AI, disaster recovery, AR/VR — all these things consume and create tremendous amounts of distributed data and distributed computing power,” he said. “And because workloads follow data, the distributed future will be much bigger than you can imagine, and so will the attack surface. Ransomware attacks are the No. 1 threat for most organizations, and are occurring every 11 seconds, with an average cost of $13 million per occurrence.”

Despite some challenges, multi-cloud technology holds huge promises for organizations. When paired with hybrid cloud, in which an organization splits its data between a cloud and an on-premise datacenter, multi-cloud infrastructure can create a truly decentralized cloud platform. This allows an organization to not depend on any singular data center or provider. According to Entrepreneur, this approach allows organizations to customize their technological environment to their specific needs.

How Cloud Technology Is Already Advancing Health Care

One industry that is already gaining benefits from cloud technology is health care. According to Forbes, these benefits include expanding access to telehealth, which has already begun under the COVID-19 pandemic. Telehealth is working to make it possible for more people in both rural and urban areas to access physicians. 

Other benefits include faster drug testing and manufacturing. For example, vaccine maker Moderna was able to speed approval for its COVID-19 vaccines with support from cloud computing through Amazon Web Services. By using cloud computing, the company was able to build a technology to rapidly test vaccines. 

“Moderna runs its Drug Design Studio on AWS’s highly scalable compute and storage infrastructure to quickly design mRNA sequences for protein targets. It then uses analytics and machine learning to optimize those sequences for production so that the company’s automated manufacturing platform can successfully convert them into physical mRNA for testing,” state Moderna and AWS.

Understanding Challenges of the Cloud

Organizations are only beginning to realize the benefits of cloud computing. However, before they adopt the cloud, they must first understand the challenges that come with embracing this rapidly advancing technology.

To learn more about the benefits and challenges of cloud computing and how it pertains to your organization, check out Cloud Computing on the IEEE Learning Network. This online course program includes 25 self-paced courses focused on various aspects of cloud computing technologies.

Interested in getting access for your organization? Contact an IEEE Content Specialist for more details.

Resource

Kuehne, Joe. (9 May 2022). Dell Tech World: Michael Dell Proclaims That the Future Is Multicloud. BizTech.

Montoya, Sergio Ramos. (10 May 2022). This is how cloud computing advances, a valuable resource for companies. Entrepreneur.

Schnitfink, Theo. (10 May 2022). How Technology Puts The ‘Care’ In Healthcare: The Role Of The Cloud During The Pandemic. Forbes.

Press Release. AWS Powers Moderna’s Digital Biotechnology Platform to Develop New Class of Vaccines and Therapeutics. Businesswire.

By utilizing multi-cloud systems, organizations are able to run their systems and store data across various cloud providers. According to the IBM Institute for Business Value, 85% of companies are currently using a multi-cloud system to manage their information. While the multi-cloud has its advantages, it also creates specific challenges that organizations need to take into consideration. Learn what you can do to work around the three most common challenges.

Network

Moving data around in the same cloud infrastructure is faster than having that information go across the internet. This means that network bandwidth and latency rates need to be taken into consideration when working with multi-cloud architectures.

If you are using a multi-cloud approach, this bottleneck is unavoidable. Network connectivity is the only way for the various clouds to communicate with one another. Fortunately, your IT team can use the approaches below to keep connectivity issues to a minimum.

• Avoid having large amounts of data stored in one cloud and processed in another. While one cloud storage service might cost less, it is not worth the potential performance issues.
• Compress data before sending it to another cloud.
• If you have workloads that are mirrored across two or more clouds to improve reliability, make sure that each cloud’s instance of the workload can operate independently when not synced. This minimizes data transfer delays that can affect performance.

Monitoring

Recognizing performance and availability problems is difficult when monitoring multiple clouds. Finding a reliable cloud monitoring tool can help you avoid this issue. Most APM solutions are able to support the majority of clouds. This gives organizations multiple options for finding the right monitoring tool.

Nevertheless, efficient performance monitoring for multi-clouds includes ensuring that the tool understands how the cloud’s workload functions. In order to alert you of incoming problems, the monitoring tool needs to recognize that the two workloads are running in different clouds although they are connected and dependent upon each other.

Scaling

One advantage of cloud computing is the ability to scale resources for workloads quickly depending on demand. However, when it is done across multiple clouds, this can be difficult.

While you cannot use Azure’s auto-scaling to scale up AWS components, you can configure autoscaling for each individual cloud. This approach should not require too much effort from your IT team. However, should this approach not work, teams can rely on a universal control plane to manage their multi-clouds. A universal control plane automates the scaling and load-balancing across multiple clouds, eliminating the need to configure each cloud.

Finding the Best Cloud Solution

Learn more about the benefits and challenges of cloud computing and how it pertains to your organization. Check out the Cloud Computing Course Program, which offers 37 self-paced courses focused on various aspects of cloud computing technologies.

Contact an IEEE Content Specialist for more details about getting access to this program for your organization.

Interested in getting the program for yourself? Visit the IEEE Learning Network today.

 

Resources

Tozzi, Christopher. (25 November 2019). Multicloud Architecture: 3 Common Performance Challenges and Solutions. ITPro Today.

Jen, Miller. (8 November 2019). Multicloud vs. hybrid cloud: What it all means. CIO Dive.