The rise of multicloud – as opposed to working with a single cloud provider or remaining wholly on-premises – is down to the flexibility and agility you gain for your organization. Whether you want to create extra capacity for seasonal demand or for testing new products, the ability to spread, migrate, expand or contract your workloads on-demand is a great option to have.

That said, no matter how agile you are, remaining fully secure and compliant is essential. Because multicloud solutions involve multiple cloud computing platforms and services from different vendors, you might be forgiven for believing that multiple clouds lead to multiple security issues. However, rather than this being a weak point, a multicloud solution can in fact improve your risk management, security and compliance – done well, it’s an opportunity to bring everything under control.

Let’s look at each of these in turn:

1. Manage risk with multicloud

A multicloud approach can help ensure that your data is always available. Risk cannot be avoided, but it can be managed. Multicloud solutions can help you do that by giving you the flexibility to spread the risk by distributing workloads and data across multiple cloud platforms. Were you to suffer a single point of failure – an outage, for example, or any other kind of disruption – your organization will keep operating.

2. Improve your security

Diversifying where your data is stored is another step you can take to improve your security posture. Again, it’s best not to have all your eggs in one basket. With multicloud, you can separate and isolate sensitive data and workloads by storing them on different cloud platforms. This can reduce the risk of damage caused by data breaches or other security threats, because it makes it more difficult for attackers to gain access to your sensitive information.

3. Stay compliant around the world

It’s not enough just to be secure; you need to be compliant too. Once again, multicloud solutions can help. You can meet compliance requirements by storing and processing data in the most appropriate locations to meet relevant regulations. For example, if your organization operates in the EU, you can protect your clients’ data in that region by using a cloud platform that complies with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

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Define your multicloud requirements

Ultimately, a multicloud strategy should serve your organization’s specific requirements. What to house in the cloud, where and why: these are the choices you must make to give you increased flexibility, agility, resilience and control.

The first step to achieving this is to identify specific workloads and data that you want to deploy in a multicloud environment. Then, define your performance, security, compliance and cost requirements. For example, to optimize performance and cost, you might opt to use one cloud platform for mission-critical workloads and another for less critical ones.

Ensure multicloud governance, security and compliance

Once your multicloud environment is up and running, you need clear policies and procedures for ongoing management and governance. Establishing rules for deploying and managing workloads and data across cloud platforms will ensure business as usual and help avoid problems down the line.

Security is another always-on requirement. Your multicloud environment must include appropriate security measures such as firewalls and encryption, with ongoing monitoring for potential security threats.

Likewise, keeping track of the latest data and privacy regulations and standards will help ensure you remain compliant.

Multicloud as a service: less risk, better security and compliance

When you embark on a multicloud strategy, you may wish to manage your multicloud solutions in-house. If so, you’ll need to acquire the right skills and resources to integrate and manage the different cloud platforms and services, and to manage risks, security and compliance issues as they arise.

An alternative is to work with a third-party provider of managed cloud services that offers multicloud as a service, such as NTT. They can help you plan and deploy multicloud faster and more securely while ensuring that all aspects of your ongoing multicloud environment are continually optimized, not just in terms of security and risk management but in other critical areas, such as performance and cost, too.  

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