Of late, a multi-cloud strategy has become the leading option for business entities as the survey found an increase in usage of approximately 15 percent between 2019 and 2020 mostly fueled by covid 19 pandemics. Multi-cloud is composed of more than one cloud platform including public, private, and hybrid clouds. Independent of any single cloud platform, a multi-cloud platform offers increased flexibility, reduced cost, enhanced scalability, and many other advantages. There also remain some cons that need to be addressed before switching over to multi-cloud such as increased training needs of personnel, reduced interoperability between applications and services, non-availability of many skilled professionals, increased operational hiccups, logistical complications, etc. However, the benefits far outweigh the cons.
What are the Pros and Cons of a Multi-Cloud Platform?
A quick look into the benefits of multi-cloud platforms often justify its enhanced usage by business entities and the most common benefits are
- Continuous Availability with little or no possibility of a service break down if one cloud goes down a business can be functional on other deployed clouds
- Flexibility and freedom of choice of platforms and solutions best suitable for your business needs
- Empowering customers to negotiate on price with ample visibility on cost and benefits
- Faster speed and better network performance with service providers having data centers closer to your locations
- Improved scalability based on business demands and extent of usage
- Quick innovation due to increased access to a wide range of tools and choosing clouds providing the best sets of services
- Better prevention of DDoS attacks as data is stored on different platforms
- Mitigating shadow IT as individual departments have accessibility to solutions as per their needs and without any need to bypass IT department
Though investing in a Multi-Cloud solution is usually a smart and beneficial investment strategy, it also comes with its fair share of challenges as
- Increased management complexities arising out of vendor-specific monitoring consoles and cloud architectures
- Increased remuneration and short supply of skilled professionals including architects, developers and testers and, administrators
- Multiple factors influencing billing and pricing for increased issues with cost analysis and reporting
- Security issues as a multi-cloud environment are more difficult to secure with several aspects to consider including encryption key, SS/TLS encryption, secrecy management, access controls, etc.
- Compliance issues as vendors can have non-standard models
- Complexities in the integration of individual SaaS solutions and reduced interoperability
What are the benefits of Cloud Accounting?
As flexibility is the essence of today’s business, we should be able to manage business operations independently of a central setting. Cloud Accounting and Bookkeeping Services offer us this advantage with several other benefits as mentioned below
- Ease of accessibility from anywhere and anytime
- Automated accounting tasks
- Real-time accounting data with better accuracy
- Ability to coordinate and collaborate even when physically distanced
- Improved data security
Strong platform features are indispensable while you choose a remote accounting platform and must-have functions that can enable you to communicate, update and share accounting data, secure information, and manage operations.
Cloud accounting platform Zoho is equipped with tools that enable remote working with several additional features and Zoho Implementation partners can identify, customize, integrate and implement the right set of Zoho tools to effectively address every business needs.
What are Multi-Cloud Models?
Multiple clouds provide strategic services to meet specific business and technical needs and are primarily classed as Software-as-a-service, or SaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-service, or IaaS and Platform-as-a-service, or PaaS.
There are many players in the multi-cloud market segment and deployments can either be a blend of public plus public or public plus private clouds. There can be different models based on business functions running on different platforms such as production running on on-premise infrastructure and development running on a public cloud. In a separate model, a single business function can run simultaneously on a multi-cloud.
What is the Future Outlook of Multi-Cloud Systems?
Multi-cloud environments are going to stay and flourish with time due to cost optimization, operational ease, and increased effectiveness. Cost optimization tools are also coming to the market for analyzing processes to maximize cost savings.
As per global surveys and market research in 2021, the multi-cloud management market is all set to expand at a CAGR of more than 25 percent between 2020 and 2026.
