Multicloud: Why It’s the Best Choice for Data
Picture this: You’re an engineer for a clothing brand that gets the bulk of its sales from online orders. All of your customer data is stored on one cloud — order history, payment information, you name it. One day, the cloud provider has an outage, and you temporarily lose… everything. Now what?
“Don’t say multicloud. Don’t say multicloud,” you might be thinking. But hold that thought.
A 2021 survey found that 90% of enterprises had already developed a multicloud strategy, ultimately leaving only 7% who reported having a single public cloud strategy and even fewer, a single private cloud. Furthermore, if you work with any sort of sensitive data — think government organizations, finance and medical institutions — a multicloud approach is almost non-negotiable. (Remember that one time the Department of Defense spent $9 billion on a multicloud contract? We do.)
In other words, if you’re not there yet, you’re behind.
Let’s talk about why going multicloud is so vital for the stability, reliability and accessibility of your data — and also debunk the misconception that multicloud is always a headache for developers. We’ll also explore how the right edge solution can transfer some of those benefits to your end users.
The Problem With Relying on Only One Cloud
You might not think that your business needs a multicloud approach. But there are two important things to consider:
The first is cloud outages, which can and do happen. In 2023 alone, Microsoft, Oracle, Datadog, Google, Cisco and AWS all experienced significant cloud outages. These events can be catastrophic because of the way they can disrupt daily operations. Not only can your company lose access to vital data and services, but if the end user can no longer access your application or website, you could be looking at a substantial revenue loss.
For instance, Datadog’s outage cost the company about $5 million and three shifts of 500 to 600 engineers to resolve. This would easily put many companies out of business.
Even without any threat of an outage, relying on a single cloud can create a colossal headache should you need to manually migrate to another cloud, which takes a lot of time, money and resources and also leaves too much room for human error.
Furthermore, what if the data center for your lone cloud provider is located in, say, California, but many of your customers are in Tokyo? Do you think those users are going to have the same stellar experience as customers in, for example, Colorado? Probably not.
So, for several reasons, one cloud might not suffice.
Multicloud and Edge Computing: A Match Made in Heaven
How can you ensure that your business operations don’t take a disastrous hit while also offering an unmatched user experience for the people who keep your lights on?
You need to combine the powers of multicloud and edge solutions.
So let’s back up for a moment.
What Is Multicloud?
When we say “multicloud,” we mean that your application exists across (you probably guessed it) several clouds, which can include hybrid, private and public clouds like AWS, GCP and Azure.
This approach offers many benefits, some of which we’ve already touched on, but let’s recap. With a multicloud approach, you can:
- Take data from an application running on one cloud and analyze it from another cloud, without having to manually move anything over.
- Migrate from one cloud provider to another with ease.
- Use data stored in different clouds to run one application, eliminating a single point of failure.
- Safeguard the customer experience by providing automated failover. If one cloud fails, another cloud provider that serves the same geographical location steps in.
What this ultimately means is that your data is more mobile and resilient, and the heavy lifting is done for you — no need to manage, move or replicate your data.
But we don’t want to stop there. While multicloud and edge solutions can exist independently of each other, the two play very nicely together because multicloud supports edge solutions quite beautifully.
What Is Edge Computing?
Let’s go back to our earlier example: Imagine you have one data center located in California. But you also have customers in Tokyo. Data has to travel much farther to reach them than it does for customers in a nearby state like Colorado.
This is where edge computing comes into play.
Edge solutions improve the experience for the end user. When you take the multicloud approach, edge computing then works to find the server closest to the user, so the experience is faster for them because the data doesn’t have to travel as far. Essentially, this means that edge computing ensures that applications and devices can function seamlessly, even if they’re located across very disparate environments (meaning multiple clouds across the globe).
So, whether you need to optimize production operations, enhance shopping experiences or improve fleet operations, multicloud and edge computing can combine forces to bring you unparalleled accessibility, reliability and resilience and provide a bulletproof approach that unifies your data even across the most distributed architecture. Edge computing opens the door to managing data from potentially millions of sensors, mobile devices, smart gadgets and kiosks.
Multicloud Is Now (And the Future)
Cloud diversity cannot be dismissed. It doesn’t merely come down to the stability and availability of your data, although those are undoubtedly crucial. It’s also about innovation. Relying on one cloud is akin to purchasing an off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solution. Is that what your business needs? Probably not. Imagine creating a logo using Microsoft Paint.
That’s your organization on a single cloud.
Improve the agility, efficiency and dynamics of your architecture while providing a rock-solid experience for your end users. Multicloud isn’t really the future. It’s the present.
The question is, how can you best go about multicloud data distribution?
One answer (which of course I’m fond of, since I work for MongoDB) is MongoDB Atlas, which makes it possible to deploy your data across more than 115 regions worldwide.
And with Atlas for the Edge, your organization can, with less friction, build applications and architectures in a single interface to deliver a smooth experience from the edge to the cloud.
And if your aim is to reach your users, no matter where they are in the world, and to keep pertinent data close to them to satisfy regulatory compliance and maintain low-latency reads and writes, then wouldn’t you want to choose the best solution for the job?
