Everybody wants to move to multicloud - how do you get there?

Everybody thinks they have to move to multicloud, but what senior leadership should be focusing on is how.

Multicloud is a setup involving multiple cloud providers in combination. This is sometimes done to benefit from the best capabilities of each cloud provider. It can also help to spread risk, because when you rely on a single cloud provider, if an outage occurs, it takes your entire application ecosystem with it. In contrast, spreading applications across multiple cloud providers promises to limit the impact of any one cloud provider failing.

However, all major cloud providers provide ways to ensure high availability of applications deployed to them.

Being resilient within a single cloud provider is hard work. This is because you need an understanding of the high availability model of the cloud provider, as well as its implications on your application architecture. We advise investing the time and effort to deeply understand one cloud provider’s high-availability model and re-architecting or deploying your application to adhere to it. Applications deployed in this way are almost certainly going to be more resilient to failure, as opposed to simply deploying your applications across multiple clouds without this additional work.  

So how do you effectively move to a multicloud way of working?

First off, start small and work out the best way of getting there, picking the right services for a particular application that might align better to a particular cloud provider over another. You don’t have to do hundreds of applications at once - move a handful and perfect your approach. AWS outlines the 7Rs of cloud migration - essentially variations on modernize, lift & shift, or replatform - and you may need to use some combination of these depending on your apps and where they are hosted currently. 

Once you understand what approach you need to take, you can start scaling and automating the process. Major organizations have used Cutover to create reusable templates that outline the basic steps to migrate their apps to the cloud, making the process of migrating multiple apps repeatable and measurable. 

In our next blog post, we share more detailed steps on how to successfully move to multicloud and get the most value out of it.

Learn the 5 essential tips that experts from AWS and Slack say will ensure a successful cloud migration or book a demo to see Cutover in action for yourself.