April, 2023

It can be tough to compete in the new world of cloud computing and AI. Especially whilst trying to keep costs down if your IT is tied to legacy systems, infrastructure or a single cloud provider. With the rise of the cloud and AI tools, we have seen many businesses adopting an ‘optimised’ multi-cloud compute strategy that takes advantage of and realises the benefits of different cloud tariffs, models and AI innovation.

Developing and maintaining an optimised hybrid cloud IT strategy does offer the real promise to enable your business to launch new products and create new revenues. However, if your in-house IT skills don’t stretch that far you will most likely stay loyal to a single cloud vendor’s technology becoming only proficient in using that provider’s native tooling and services. Where access to IT skills is wider across multiple cloud providers that can cover a full range of all cloud provider’s capabilities, confidence can quickly build in achieving the full benefits of moving to a multi-cloud strategy.

Is Successful Multi-Cloud Computing Just a Skill Gap Challenge?

Not necessarily. It is a fact that 83% of organisations cited a lack of resources or expertise as one of their top cloud challenges (The State of Cloud 2022, Flexera, 2022) but that’s not the full picture. To protect profitability and continue innovation, businesses also need to focus on optimising cloud-based infrastructures to improve efficiency, performance and security.

Related Read: Future-proof your business by optimising your use of cloud technology

Having both access to the skills as well as being proficient in delivering and maintaining an efficient but automated hybrid cloud IT environment strategy is key in delivering business innovation, cost efficiency and fast time to market.

Related Read: Maximising the Benefits of Managed Cloud IT Environments

6 Reasons a Multi-Cloud Automation Strategy is Crucial for Your Business

A multi-cloud automation strategy allows you to truly automate processes across multiple cloud environments, ensuring consistency and efficiency.

Here are six reasons why adopting a multi-cloud automation strategy is crucial for your business.

1. Avoid Vendor Lock-in
   Leverage different cloud providers to use different cloud platforms for different purposes, reducing the dependence on a single vendor. This flexibility will enable your business to be agile with the ability to switch providers as necessary and avoid any vendor-specific constraints.
2. Improve Business Continuity
   Reduce the risk of downtime by ensuring that in the event of a failure in one cloud provider, the workload can be automatically transferred to another cloud provider, reducing the risk of downtime and eliminating extended downtime.
3. Increase Scalability
   Scale your infrastructure up or down based on demand. Additionally, you can use the resources of different cloud providers to scale horizontally, providing a more flexible and robust infrastructure.
4. Improve Cost Efficiency
   Reduce cloud spend by leveraging different cloud providers for different workloads, selecting the most cost-effective provider for each workload. Also, you can develop automation to optimise cloud resources, reduce waste and lower costs.
5. Enhance Security
   Enhance security by providing redundancy across different cloud providers to ensure that in the event of a security breach in one cloud provider, the workload can be automatically transferred to another cloud provider, reducing the risk of data loss. You can also use different security measures from different cloud providers, ensuring a more robust security infrastructure.
6. Increase Innovation
   Experiment with different cloud providers to give you the flexibility to try new services and features. Furthermore, you can use the resources of different cloud providers to build new applications and services, providing a competitive advantage.

Conclusion

Adopting a multi-cloud automation strategy is increasingly common in small-to-medium businesses. Managing multi-cloud infrastructure can be daunting for IT leaders but the upside far outweighs the risk. By leveraging different cloud providers, businesses can build a more flexible, robust, and efficient infrastructure that can adapt to changing business needs.

How Sify Can Help

Sify’s deep experience, resources and skills in cloud automation make it best placed to understand how your business can innovate and create new revenues. With a heritage in IT Infrastructure, Sify has grown over two decades to provide a one-stop engagement across networks, data centre, cloud DevOps, automation and IT security.

Sify enables you to build and automate multi-cloud IT infrastructures, by delivering flexible expertise to fill IT skills gaps, and by deploying, managing and optimising CI-CD service environments that deliver the right combination of flexibility, security and affordability.

Sify Managed Services can help your organisation solve:

• Optimisation – Future-proof your business by automating more DevOps tasks, streamlining IT processes and optimising your use of different cloud technologies.
• Resources – Increase responsiveness with access to the right scale and calibre of specialist IT skills as and when you need them.
• Cost Savings – Make your IT budget go further by lowering your technical debt and becoming more efficient.
• Reduce Risk – Control your risks by ensuring the security and resilience of your IT infrastructure.

Using the cloud for business is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. It means instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical kit, businesses can access technology services, such as IT resources, computing power, storage, and databases as and when needed.

Traditionally, IT infrastructure was designed to handle the maximum workload. It meant businesses would be charged the same regardless of their usage. With the cloud, businesses are charged based purely on usage, not on the usage they think they need. This is how the cloud is fundamentally different.

Cloud offers a more agile, fluid IT environment whereby the potential to make cost-savings is there though not guaranteed. Forward planning pre-migration and ongoing cost optimisation post-migration are key to maximising cost efficiencies.

Related Read: Future-proof your business by optimising your use of cloud technology

Benefits of the Cloud

High Scalability
Cloud platforms can deliver enormous quantities of resources to drive almost any size workload or computing demand. For businesses with fluctuating demand seasonally or high growth plans, the demand can be scaled up or down easily and quickly compared to traditional environments. Those resources can then be released when work is complete or demands change.

Improved Productivity
Changes to a cloud IT environment can be made quicker than in a traditional IT infrastructure. With the right expertise, new instances can be spun up in minutes and then removed just as quickly. This on-demand and rapid deployment allows accelerated development and increased productivity for the business. Without hardware limitations placed on them, it allows developers to test new ideas and design new applications easier.

Challenges of Cloud

Complex Cloud Environments
The accelerated move to the cloud, largely due to the COVID pandemic, has left many businesses with poorly designed, sub-optimal infrastructures. This has resulted in complexity, lack of agility and excess cost. On top of this, skills gaps within organisations, have led to poor decision-making. Key decision-makers are often ill-equipped to identify and implement the most efficient hybrid structure.

Cost Inefficiency
Cost savings are undoubtedly a benefit of cloud IT environments, but they are not automatic. Achieving cost savings over traditional IT environments and then sustaining them requires ongoing optimisation work. Unfortunately, a lack of understanding of the pricing models of cloud platforms means that many businesses are failing to take full advantage of PAYG cloud.

Resourcing Issues
Traditional IT infrastructure requires more planning due to the slow-moving changes required for fluctuations in capacity. With the cloud, businesses need to be more agile and reactive by adjusting resources and capacity in real time. This puts the burden on businesses to implement and assess cloud utilisation constantly to ensure cloud usage maps with business plans and goals.

Conclusion

Navigating the increasing complexity of deploying, managing and optimising cloud infrastructures is undoubtedly a difficult task. This is on top of managing escalating costs of cloud-based infrastructure to demonstrate a good return on investment.

In a world where IT leaders are being told to do more with less it’s clear optimising what you have to improve efficiency, performance and security is the logical place to start.

Managing the IT resources needed in a scalable, flexible and repeatable way is the challenge. The IT skills shortage, particularly for newer cloud-based technologies, is a critical barrier to taking full advantage of the cloud.

How Sify Can Help

Sify’s deep experience, resources and skills make it best placed to understand the digital transformation needs of modern-day businesses. With a heritage in IT Infrastructure, Sify has grown over two decades to provide a one-stop engagement across networks, data centre, cloud, digital and IT services.

Sify enables you to build an IT infrastructure that underpins business profitability, by delivering flexible expertise to fill IT skills gaps, and by deploying, managing and optimising complex hybrid environments to deliver the right combination of flexibility, security and affordability.

Here are the key challenges our Managed Services can help your organisation solve:

• Optimisation – Future-proof your business by optimising your use of cloud technology.
• Resources – Increase responsiveness with access to the right scale and calibre of specialist IT skills as and when you need them.
• Cost Savings – Make your IT budget go further by lowering your costs and becoming more efficient.
• Reduce Risk – Control your risks by ensuring the security and resilience of your IT infrastructure.

Related Read: Why Do Businesses Need Managed Services?

Working with a trusted partner like Sify can offer the right combination of flexibility, expertise and affordability, all essential elements if businesses are to stay competitive. Sify offers a breadth and depth of cloud expertise with an affordable cost model, to help SMBs optimise their cloud infrastructure and fill gaps in their in-house skills.