Multiple Clouds, Fractional Costs: A Roadmap to an Efficient Multi-Cloud Strategy

The cloud market has rapidly matured and evolved over the past decade. And companies that took advantage of the promise of the cloud by partnering with providers’ early offerings in the early 2010s reaped the payoff. 

But as time passed, cloud lost some of its luster for businesses that maintained a single-cloud strategy. Higher costs, low flexibility and a general lack of guidance around the platforms have left many business and IT leaders wanting more.

Not only are some cloud platforms and strategies stagnating progress toward IT modernization, they’re not even performing their existing functions cost effectively. 

Sound familiar? If cloud investments are keeping you up at night, you’re not alone — nine out of 10 IT leaders say they believe they’re wasting money in the cloud. 

If you haven’t done so already, it’s time to re-examine your assumptions about the cloud marketplace. This isn’t 2006, when AWS and IBM were the biggest names with successful use cases in nearly every industry and vertical. There is much more room to map cloud strategy in 2023. Migration is simpler, integrations are more pervasive and cloud partners have honed their expertise in multi-cloud environments. 

But how is it possible that adding a cloud environment could help reduce costs? With the right roadmap and support, a multi-cloud strategy can do just that, while also making your organization more agile and potentially even more secure. 

Mapping Multi-Cloud with an Eye Toward Reducing Costs

Before mapping a strategy to save with multi-cloud, let’s dispel a common myth. Adopting a multi-cloud environment doesn’t mean all the legacy processes and business operations need to be lifted and shifted. In fact, that’s what created many of the inefficient and inflexible cloud operations today — a rush into the cloud from on-prem. 

The places where a roadmap toward a more efficient cloud operation really comes into play are the areas a legacy cloud provider can’t touch. Automation, better security, significantly improved data maturity — newer players like Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are multi-cloud partners that can prove essential to saving money in the cloud. 

If you’re beginning to explore what your business might look like with multi-cloud, consider the following milestones on your journey: 

• Assess cloud wellness. However you arrived at your current cloud deployment, chances are some elements of your infrastructure aren’t operating as efficiently as they should. You can assess the health of your cloud by focusing on six critical areas: utilization, manageability, performance, security, user experience and reliability. If you don’t immediately know whether your cloud performs to the highest standards in each of these areas, it’s time to reassess. Better yet, find a partner that provides six-point Cloud Health Checks to have a third party identify objectives for modernization. 
• Determine the right workloads to migrate. It can be difficult to determine exactly which workloads or processes will net lower overall costs. But it’s getting easier with automation. GCP’s StratoZone assessments are an innovative way to begin imagining the possibilities of multi-cloud. This automated tool can crawl your current infrastructure and determine which processes might be better suited for GCP, and even assist in starting migration — making it an end-to-end option for leaders in a hurry to save. 
• Find the right partner. Eighty-six percent of organizations rely on a centralized team that exclusively handles cloud functions. But instead of spending their time on maintenance and upkeep, these teams should focus on app modernization and making the cloud as efficient as possible. A Google Cloud Partner, for example, can help organizations navigate a transition of processes and services to GCP in the most efficient way possible, and help autoscale future deployments along the way. While GCP offers many automated functions and tools, it takes an expert to design and build scalable and reliable cloud-based applications on GCP — an expert with know-how in microservices, managed services, and various other best practices. This not only frees up IT teams, but helps them become adept in a host of GCP tools that can transform the way they work. 

Mapping a multi-cloud strategy that enables you to move away from an inefficient cloud relationship is far easier than it used to be. More partners with better tools mean IT leaders who have struggled to rein in costs can finally make progress.

If plotting this map seems daunting on your own, we can help you find your way. Connect with a Promevo Cloud Advisor today to schedule a free consultation or a Google Cloud Health Check — our comprehensive service for supporting cloud optimization.