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According to the Cloud Transformation Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano, 68% of companies use more than one Cloud provider

For years now, Cloud Computing has been used as a business model that more and more small, medium or large companies cannot do without. It is a “cloud” of data, information and services that is always accessible, from any device in any place, as long as you have an internet connection. A model of use capable of overcoming time and space and a great advantage for the customer who “pays for what he consumes”, reducing the investments for the purchase and management of an IT infrastructure, thus concentrating all its resources on the pursuit of business-related objectives. However, for some time now we have been hearing about Multi Cloud, the advantages and prospects of an agile, versatile and (perhaps) even efficient model.

But what is Multi Cloud and why is it considered the future of IT services? A Multi Cloud environment consists of multiple public or private cloud services provided by different providers. In these environments, the company uses and coordinates the services of two or more providers to best meet its economic, technical or functional needs.

Be careful, though. Multi Cloud environment does not mean that several Cloud solutions simply coexist for a company, but it means that these solutions connect and are exploited with dynamism and flexibility. In this way, companies take advantage of the different modes of operation and the specific offerings of suppliers.

Suffice it to say that data from the Cloud Transformation Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano, dating back to the end of 2019, shows that 68% of companies use more than one Cloud provider.

The Multi Cloud therefore allows corporate customers to avoid dependence on a single supplier. Speaking of providers, at the moment on the market the main providers on the market are Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud, the latter of which is very present in Asia. On the other hand, mostly used by small and medium-sized industrial enterprises is Alibaba Cloud. As far as Italy is concerned, on the other hand, there is the historic Aruba and the recent proposal of Retelit in collaboration with Huawei.

But Multi Cloud seems to be advantageous for companies for other reasons as well. For example, it can provide the possibility to choose, from time to time, on which provider to purchase a specific service based on the best performance-cost ratio. Not only that, there would also be the advantage of being “supported” by a business community in which applications are replicated on different environments, which work in “active-active” mode, i.e. in which both are always active and share workloads, or in “active-passive” mode in which one of the two only performs a backup task. Finally, among the advantages that should not be underestimated is the creation of geographically distributed environments that allow you to increase application performance in specific regions, while complying with compliance related to data localization.

These are the advantages and trends of Multi Cloud, however when it comes to Multi Cloud it should not be confused with Hybrid Cloud, two common but different strategic approaches. In the case of the Hybrid Cloud, we mean an environment that uses public and private Cloud and “on-premises” solutions, with the aim of making the best of the various ways of delivering technologies according to the needs of the client company. The second case, that of the Multi Cloud, includes situations in which a company uses and coordinates Public Cloud services from two or more providers to best meet its business and technical needs.

Data from the Cloud Transformation Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano dating back to 2019 shows that the main advantages sought by companies in the evolution towards Hybrid and Multi Cloud environments are greater continuity of service, scalability of systems, lower risk of lock-in by the Cloud provider, optimization of the overall cost of the system and obtaining better features to support processes. At the bottom, on the other hand, is the desire to provide services more efficiently in different geographical areas at an international level, a figure conditioned by the low level of internationalization of Italian companies and the desire to keep the most critical workloads internally, bringing only secondary components to the Cloud.