By Modeen Malick, Principal Systems Engineer at Commvault

Due to their flexibility and capacity to prevent vendor lock-in, a multicloud approach has become popular since it enables businesses to select the best cloud and service provider for their requirements. Furthermore, in a market that is always changing, multicloud offers the opportunity to quickly "bounce" between different platforms and applications and expand or decrease storage as needed. This allows organisations to scale up or down as necessary, deploy applications to various cloud environments, and react to changing business needs. Ultimately, organisations can increase their agility, resilience, and data management skills while cutting costs and enhancing performance.

However, a multicloud strategy is not without difficulties. If businesses wish to manage multicloud systems, they must invest in the right skills for each cloud vendor. When it comes to architecting across the many cloud platforms, there are no short cuts, especially given the likelihood of unplanned costs of moving data between cloud vendors. Because managing backups and data across clouds is challenging, organisations should ideally utilise a single data management system that supports multiple cloud vendors and enables backups to be managed from a single console.

In a multicloud context, security and legal compliance are also crucial factors to take into account. Several security admin skillsets are needed to manage security access with backed-up data across various cloud providers, which can be difficult. This is where a single solution that can interface with the multiple authentication protocols used by cloud providers is ideal. In addition, different application administrative users can be mapped to the data that backed up. The same backup system should also be able to perform full e-discovery on emails and file the data that has been backed up, as well as provide compliance and legal holds as necessary.

To guarantee constant data accessibility, cloud service providers must also prioritise data redundancy. Organisations should enquire whether their customer data is replicated outside South Africa and whether providers waiver egress fees for third-party backup solutions, especially when compliance mandates data replication, to prevent data loss and ensure business continuity. While answering these questions is critical, businesses should also consider adopting multicloud strategies to diversify data storage and minimise the risk of data loss or downtime. Communicating with multiple cloud providers can help businesses maintain their data redundancy guarantees and ensure data security.

Multicloud is here to stayand holds an important place in a customer's cloud migration strategy. Yet interestingly, in order to streamline data management and lessen the overall compliance load, many clients will choose a single cloud vendor. But,there will be occasions when customers require features that their present supplier does not offer and are offered by a different vendor. In this case, future multicloud solutions will allow for greater availability and traffic load balancing by providing free or very low egress fees for migrations out of a cloud vendor. A separate cloud will oversee managing replicated dispersed workloads spread across many providers. Businesses that use this technology will be well-positioned to stay ahead as multicloud technology continues to evolve and innovate.