Searching for the Best Cyber Security Measure? Adopt Multi-Cloud Strategy Today

A cloud paradigm is where an enterprise can leverage multiple cloud platforms as per the different needs and contexts of their workloads, data-related factors, budgets, provisioning aspects, and scale-buckets. 

The world of business cannot work with agility and confidence if it has to be constantly worried about vendor lock-ins, hidden cloud costs, business downtime and cloud-led outages. That is why enterprises are embracing multiple clouds to get more flexibility, freedom, uptime, modularity, interoperability, and readiness for cloud-native applications.

• Enterprises are investing in multi-cloud format to save costs, avoid lock-ins, use best-available solutions, ensure business uptime, and to optimise their IT.
• Enterprises are embracing multiple clouds to harness trends like modularity, interoperability, and cloud-native applications.
• Chief concerns on an enterprise’s radar are: business continuity, security and data control, orchestration, monitoring and management.
• Practical issues like visibility, portability, too many best practices or frameworks from different cloud providers - all of these add to the complexity of multi-cloud options.

Organisations can leverage the benefits of this approach while minimising the downside - this needs a well-mapped path where diverse imperatives are aligned well. Scalability and uptime cannot be prioritised at the cost of security, data control, and visibility-gaps. Also, it is important for enterprises to be equipped with all the skills, resources and tools that this direction would necessitate.

Put simply, a multi-cloud strategy is one where you opt for different cloud options for different workloads and requirements. You can use Software as a Service (SaaS) for one application, use one Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform for storage of one business function data, you can use another cloud provider for some other region or branch or function’s requirements - basically, you are using multiple clouds for various needs. 

This is sometimes confused with using a mix of public and private clouds too, but that is better tagged as the Hybrid Cloud model. Nomenclature aside, the key essence of using many clouds is that you diversify your cloud provisioning and also your cloud risks.

It is an arrow that hits more than one dartboard:

• You can spin up applications in a quick and compartmentalized manner.
• You can try out the advancements and features that each cloud provider offers.
• You can be the first in line for any new technological development without investing too much in it.
• You can achieve true elasticity with a cloud-agnostic infrastructure.
• Also multi-cloud models provide more backup options in the event a cloud provider experiences an outage.
• The enterprise can handle load balancing of applications across all cloud providers around the world. More so, when different cloud providers can help you cover more than one geography or region.
• When you start combining clouds, this helps to navigate data sovereignty as well as business continuity in a smart way.
• In fact, with Shadow-IT as an invisible beast- most enterprises may already be having some form of multi-cloud footprint in action. Why not make it formal and more structured?

And when all that is happening, you are also diluting the impact of cloud outages and downtime - because if one cloud provider faces any problem, you have another one to instantly jump in, rise to the occasion, and rescue your business. Also, the best of cloud offerings – even the top 3 names come at a heavy price not to mention their weak areas and dangers of lock-ins. 

If you take Amazon Web Services (AWS), the pros are its first-mover advantage, great discounts, and a deep and wide portfolio that comprises next-gen stuff like AI, Edge, Blockchain etc. But there can be hidden costs, confusion over practical pricing, outages and issues of sprawl in some deployments if not managed well. 

With Microsoft, you may not get the raw hyper-scaler advantage that AWS and Google come with - however, it has many years of enterprise-grade delivery expertise under its belt. With regard to Google, while it packs cards like Containers, has good customization capabilities, storage, scalability, and a strong engineering base; there is a lot of focus on price-discount wars. Plus, scalability and data sovereignty factors can run into a wall in some regions.  

So you see - there are pros and cons of every offering. That is where this multi-cloud strategy helps. It offers freedom and confidence that is hard to eke out in a single cloud stack. The best advantage is that your risk is not concentrated but distributed and you are in better control as well. This is something that matters a lot to today’s enterprises – after all, they have to juggle the agility of the cloud along with adjacent threats and complex challenges.

Let us understand this more in-depth.

Cloud adoption is progressing fast and revealing interesting trends every year. Here are some key patterns:

The Diversity Advantage

In an 2021 O'Reilly's survey (which had 36% programmers, 21% architects or technical leads, 10% C-suite executives, 8% managers, 7% data professionals, and 6% operations staff) 23% revealed they were using multi-cloud models. Similarly, when we look at the 2020 IDG Cloud Computing Survey (a survey of over 500 IT professionals) we observe that when organizations tap multiple public clouds, the primary goal (as per 49% of respondents) is to make use of ‘best of breed’ platforms and service options. 

Gartner had explained in a survey of public cloud users, that 81% of respondents were working with 2 or more providers due to the desire to avoid vendor lock-in or to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions. The survey summarised that it is most likely that large organizations will continue to wilfully pursue this approach. 

Financial and Other Freedoms

Other reasons like cost savings or optimization at 41%, and avoiding vendor lock-in (40%) are also strong factors that make such models lucrative for organisations. 

What also helps is that modern applications are by design modular so they can span multiple cloud providers or consume services from multiple clouds. It connotes the appetite and ability on the side of customers to pick and stitch cloud strategies that work best for their unique context.

Back-Up and Safety

Note how there were 40% respondents who highlighted the need for improving disaster recovery or business continuity. Also, 38% cited data privacy and security challenges as their top cloud concerns while 31% highlighted securing and protecting cloud resources as a challenge. 

Ensuring business continuity and security are, definitely, front-burner reasons for opting for this model. What weighs in favour of the multi-cloud approach is the list of benefits like risk mitigation. 

Flexibility

The rise of modularity and cloud-native applications supported by Containers, Micro-services and DevOps - makes such models really relevant today. This adds to the ease of jumping between many clouds without too much hassle. With a variety of cloud providers - each with their own expertise and domain strengths, an enterprise gets to enjoy many levels of functionality and features. 

There is also a growing inclination towards open-source code and cloud, with more data transferability and open data platforms that accelerate interoperability so that the practical experience of a multi-cloud scenario is smooth.

Supplier-Side collaboration

While enterprises are improving their stance through cloud-neutral strategies, vendors are forming partnerships and coalitions to offer a wider breadth and deeper security advantages to their customers. Some collaborations can be seen in SAP-Google joining forces around some HANA offerings, in the Enterprise Cloud Coalition, in the strategic partnership between Microsoft and Oracle, and in the strategic alliance between AWS and MongoDB. There is also nascent interest in Block-Cloud- a Cloud format powered through the decentralization that Blockchain configures at a deep level.

Uptime and Reliability

All these new directions help improve metrics on uptime and improve bounce-back time during outages (remember how 2020 alone shook the industry with seven major Cloud outages and how 2021 created deeper ripples with cloud-related and supply-chain attacks). 

Accenture reported that the majority of surveyed organizations had suffered. Of these, 98%  say that a single hour of downtime per year costs about $100,000. This is when we still have to account for brand damage, litigation expenses and other penalties. No enterprise wants to suffer these costs and lights-out scenarios - especially after investing in the cloud.

Application portability and security were the biggest concerns (both 24%) in the O’Reilly survey, followed by data portability (12%), the cost of moving data out of one cloud provider into another (9%), managing workloads at scale across multiple platforms (both 8%); and visibility into application performance (7%).

According to the F5 State of Application Strategy Report, more and more organizations are using multi-clouds each year. It also pointed out that one of the biggest inconsistencies to overcome is that cloud providers often use different security models. Especially when one runs into varying responsibilities and compliance obligations, differing best-practice frameworks and concurrency issues. This is exacerbated due to visibility lags and overstretched security teams. 

To add to these challenges, there are issues like cloud resource sprawl or forgotten cloud instances that have critical authentication keys. That means that just investing in multiple clouds will not suffice – unless one has the right set of skills and expertise to manage the various issues that come along with these clouds. 

It is also very vital to have the right monitoring tools, orchestration solutions, and governance mechanisms in place if an enterprise wants to get the best of a multi-cloud strategy. Similarly, it has to make sure that apt cloud skills, wherever needed, are in place. Especially, in areas like security, microservices, containers, cloud architecture, AI, and orchestration.

Consider this, in the IDG survey, 48% cited increased complexity as the main downside to using multiple clouds, while 34% indicated the increased cost of training and hiring as a big issue. Multiple or not, an enterprise needs the apt expertise to manage a specific IaaS cloud’s complexities for taking care of cloud configuration and administration. Tools that offer a single-pane-of-glass level of visibility and management can be of some help here. So would be the presence of the right talent and measures to standardize policies, procedures and processes for better cloud governance and optimization — across multiple cloud providers.

Hence - what would also be extremely useful is the right, and timely, investment in skills through some good cloud certification courses - Cloud DevOps Engineer Professional Certificate by Coursera, and Google Cloud Certification by Coursera. One can also consider getting equipped in cloud computing skill set with a wider ambit through mastering AWS certified Cloud practitioner, Google Cloud platform associate Cloud engineer practice test, Google certified professional Cloud architect course and other Cloud professional certifications.

The aim should be to get the requisite depth in the domain of cloud - and if that can be done with a security context, that is a big augmentation. One can consider specialised courses here like the GreyCampus Cybersecurity Foundations Course, Whizlab's Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge V.4, Coursera's AWS S3 Basics, and Coursera's Introduction to Cyber Security for Business etc. 

One can also cover the Cloud back-end or/and front-end dimensions well with courses on APIs, infrastructure and development areas. Some apt ones are the Eduonix's IaaS Cloud Computing With OpenStack Masterclass, Learn Kubernetes with AWS and Docker by Whizlabs, Coursera's API Design and Fundamentals of Google Cloud’s Apigee API Platform and Edureka's Microservices Certification Training Course.  These competencies help to sharpen and deepen one’s edge in making cloud work to one’s maximum advantage – without getting caught up in hassles of execution.

The idea is to confuse the attacker- and not fight with confusion internally. You need a pin-cushion strategy that works brilliantly – not the numb feeling of pins and needles that comes in because you are too confused or burdened with managing multiple clouds.

Put on that bullet-vest – after stitching it right. Create a really strong armour – and dodge those bullets.