Why Organizations Are Embracing the Multi-Cloud

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.