From Cloud Chaos to Multicloud Mastery: A Roadmap for IT Leaders

The digital revolution is reshaping the business landscape. The cloud, once a futuristic concept, is at its epicenter.

Yet today’s companies aren’t satisfied with a single cloud; they’re demanding the agility and flexibility of a multicloud strategy. This shift brings a new set of challenges.

A recent roundtable and workshop organized by CDOTrends in partnership with Equinix examined these challenges and potential best practices. The senior IT leaders, hailing from key Hong Kong conglomerates, enterprises and financial services companies, revealed a pressing need to address these challenges head-on, especially with the rise of AI and increasing regulatory scrutiny.

Decoding the multicloud mandate

Anthony Ho, director for product and solution marketing in the Asia Pacific at Equinix Hong Kong, observed that the pandemic accelerated digital transformation and catapulted cloud adoption into the mainstream. He also notes that adoption is here to stay.

The momentum is only speeding up. For example, Equinix's latest Global Tech Trends survey reveals a staggering statistic: over 72% of IT leaders plan to migrate even more business functions to the cloud.

However, the figures hide another revelation. The fundamental paradigm shift is not about cloud migration; instead, it is the emergence of hybrid and multicloud strategies.

Why this shift? During the roundtable discussion, the participants noted that their companies are no longer content with a one-size-fits-all approach. They crave the agility to handpick the best cloud for each workload, optimizing performance, cost, and compliance.

Another key reason was that the multi-cloud approach offers the flexibility to avoid vendor lock-in, tailor solutions to specific business needs, and navigate the complexities of increasingly complex data sovereignty regulations.

“For those who choose multi-cloud, there are several reasons...they want to make sure they choose the best of breed. They have a mission; they don't want to be locked down,” said Ho.

While the reasons are persuasive, not every company is going multicloud. Ho observed, “We see different maturity within teams. Everyone is using the cloud, but not everyone is using multi-cloud at this moment.”

The hidden potholes on the multicloud highway

While the business case sounds obvious, many are still hitting pause on multicloud.

One primary reason is connectivity. Ho explained that relying on the public internet for cloud connectivity—a route many adopters took—can lead to unpredictable performance and security risks. This hinders your ability to deliver seamless digital experiences to your customers and employees.

Then you have the issue of each cloud provider having its own set of security tools and protocols. This creates a management nightmare for your IT team and potentially exposes your organization to vulnerabilities. Add the talent crunch in cloud engineering and site reliability engineering, and you have a major headache.

Then you have the age-old question of economics. The cost of multicloud can be a significant concern for infrastructure heads. Egress fees, the charges incurred when transferring data out of a cloud, can quickly escalate and impact your bottom line—something many participants highlighted.

As Ho said, "We all recognize the egress cost is one of the biggest challenges. Some [companies] are using leased lines to reduce costs."

Another daunting task is maintaining consistent performance across multiple clouds, especially over the Internet. This can lead to frustrated users, decreased productivity, and missed business opportunities.

Managing a patchwork of connections to different clouds and data centers can quickly become unwieldy, hindering your ability to scale and adapt to changing business needs. It can also pose a problem for AI models, where the learning and inference stages make reliable, predictable connectivity a minimum requirement—not an option.

Making Equinix your multicloud nerve center

In this complex landscape, Equinix is quickly emerging as a trusted partner.

Sharon Leung, Equinix's senior manager for field development in segment marketing at Equinix Hong Kong, emphasized that the company’s global network of interconnected data centers housing all major cloud providers gives a strategic advantage in the multi-cloud era.

The company offers a nexus where the physical and digital worlds converge, providing a platform for seamless interconnection and collaboration. It allows companies to choose the right mix of cloud environments based on their use case and current requirements and remain agile to future needs.

Equinix also offers a comprehensive suite of solutions to address the multicloud challenges head-on. For example, companies can bypass the public internet with Equinix Fabric, a software-defined interconnection platform that allows them to establish secure, high-performance connections to major cloud platforms. This mitigates security and compliance risks while keeping data integrity intact.

Equinix's extensive global footprint also allows companies to place their data and workloads closer to their customers and users, optimizing performance and reducing latency—a major requirement for AI applications, as noted by the roundtable participants. This strategic placement enhances the user experience and contributes to significant cost savings.

What’s more important is that Equinix offers a single portal for managing all cloud connections of a company, which streamlines operations, reduces complexity, and minimizes the risk of errors. Meanwhile, Equinix's global network of data centers allows them to expand their reach, tap into new markets, and establish a truly global presence—fast.

It’s what SBI Sumishin Net Bank, a leading virtual bank in Japan, was looking for. It wanted to navigate the complexities of the multi-cloud while meeting the strict regulations.

So, the bank successfully leveraged Equinix's platform to host its commercial systems on AWS, utilize Microsoft Azure for internal collaboration, and seamlessly connect to both clouds for data analytics. This strategic approach ensured security and compliance and optimized performance and cost-efficiency.

AI on the horizon: Why timing and partnership matters

As companies continue adopting cloud technologies, the roundtable conversation shifted towards AI and its transformative potential.

While AI's possibilities are vast, ranging from personalized customer experiences to data-driven decision-making, organizations must first define clear objectives and ensure they have the necessary infrastructure and expertise to support AI initiatives.

Both Ho and Leung concluded that the time to act is now. Embracing multicloud allows companies to unlock the power of AI, but they don't have to do it alone.

By partnering with players like Equinix, they can build a resilient, high-performance infrastructure that can handle the complexities of the digital age and prepare for the AI-powered future.

The future of their businesses depend on it.

Image credit: iStockphoto/PeopleImages