Last week when many of us could not access our iTunes account or watch our favourite on-demand videos, we wondered why. The dam “cloud”! And we wouldn’t be wrong.

Many organisations found themselves facing a cloud provider outage. These things do happen. The cloud is not fail proof. As everyday users of cloud services (as a consumer or at an enterprise level), what we need to realise is that there no value in pointing fingers. Understanding why this happened and embracing key learnings to mitigate future occurrences is the silver lining to successful cloud management.

We’ve all heard the adage, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and in the case of cloud engagement, the importance of a multi- cloud approach to connectivity, data integrity and workflow is fast becoming a necessary reality rather than choice for many organisations. Recent experience has hopefully taught us that.

The cloud can be a hazy space with directional clarity often difficult due to an intense vendor market, but one thing is for sure, there are…

5 key reasons to have a multi-cloud strategy (that we at ASE believe to be true).

1. Achievement of higher availability that can be achieved in a single cloud service provider.

• Split workloads between different cloud providers using application high availability features such as those available in Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise
• Dual, diverse connections to different cloud service provider data centres and customer network points of interconnection

2. Commercial tension ensuring competitive pricing

• The ability to seamlessly and autonomously add resources with any cloud provider
• Ensures that vendor lockin doesn’t occur should pricing change

3. Access to the best service that every service provider has to offer by separating data from the application, services or compute resources

• Different providers have different focusses in terms of value that their applications add to customer workload and workflow
• As new services are released to market, the ability to take advantage of new features and business benefits is enabled through a multi-cloud strategy

4. Protection of a business’s most important asset – their data, in multiple locations

• Ensures data is in a known location which is geographically separate from other copies of the data. This is important to protect against large scale disastwer generally caused by weather or seismic events – example Brisbane floods and severe thunderstorm in Sydney which knocked out AWS. Also can be caused by datacentre catastrophe – example Dallas fire as HP DC
• As data is separate from applications, it can be managed by policy, transparently to the application

5. Reduced risk of vendor technical lock-in

• The ability to seamlessly and transparently move workload ensure customer has ultimate choice in provider

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