By Brendan McAravey, country manager, Citrix South Africa

We can all agree that cloud has practically become a part of our everyday lives, whether you’re streaming your favourite Netflix shows, or even engaging in simple communication with friends and co-workers on Slack. This is why when the cloud provider that owns the lion’s share of the market for hosting many popular internet sites and services has a problem, it makes headlines.

Many services across the web are prone to outages. The cloud provides many benefits around economies of scale and availability, but it is still vulnerable to outages, much like any other enterprise managed datacentre.

As the enterprise begins its exodus to the cloud, hybrid has become the “new norm” as they transition their applications and infrastructure to the public cloud. Large scale outages can cast a shadow of concern for many organisations that are betting big on the cloud.

This is probably where many must extend the scope of their cloud migration strategy to include plans for multi-cloud capability. As much effort as it takes to convert and migrate your applications to be supported in the cloud, the last thing any organisation wants is to be held hostage to that one cloud provider – with no contingency plan in place for failover.

While a multi-cloud strategy ensures business continuity, managing workloads in multiple clouds creates a new level of complexity. Managers need a simple way to deploy, manage and monitor IT workloads and services on multiple clouds, along with the apps and data they continue to manage on-premises. 

That’s why enterprises are turning to hybrid cloud, which is designed to manage the secure delivery of apps and data from any cloud. Services can be deployed on your choice of infrastructure, and ultimately managed in a way that allows administrators to seamlessly move workloads from on-premises IT infrastructure or private clouds to public clouds.

With hybrid cloud, administrators can not only deploy and manage software as services on any cloud, they can move those workloads across those clouds and proprietary environments. For IT organisations that must manage services across different data sources spanning traditional datacenters, public clouds, SaaS providers and on multiple devices, hybrid cloud is engineered to unite these into a truly seamless workspace that embodies how people work.  

High availability is critical – and when that becomes compromised the costs to the business can indeed be significant. Placing all your bets on one cloud provider can have long term repercussions to the business. Multi-cloud architectures should now be a critical component for enterprise business continuity, and hybrid cloud provides the fabric that securely delivers applications and data, while uniting everything that’s important for getting work done, on any cloud.