Navigating the Multi-Cloud Landscape: Trends, Challenges, and Best Practices

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Ravinder Singh, SVP – Consulting, CitiusTech

1. The adoption of multi-cloud strategies has gained significant traction in recent years. Could you provide us with an overview of the current business landscape in terms of multi-cloud adoption? What are the key trends that you believe are shaping this dynamic sector, and how have these trends evolved?

Let us look at the key forces that are shaping cloud adoption in healthcare. The first and foremost is how healthcare is shaping up with software taking on the primetime for care delivery, outcomes, innovation and ultimately revenue generation through digital models. Digitally augmented businesses need to be agile, scalable, and responsive to consumer needs.

The second driver is exponential increase in healthcare data. Various estimates claim that healthcare contributes about 30% of total global data volumes. This data needs storage as well as processing for AI/ML and insights.

Third biggest force is innovation by cloud providers to provide tools and healthcare specific services that are driving innovation in development, running, securing and compliance of software applications, available on-demand. Specific workloads like interoperability, medical imaging or clinical research use cases can leverage cloud native healthcare tools and products that better suit these medical use cases.

Organizations are adopting multi-cloud strategy to leverage best of breed capabilities that are best fit for their workloads. Certain workloads can be implemented at lower cost of ownership that includes kind of software licensing options, technology stack support and cost of basic compute and storage works out. Organizations are likely to choose the one that delivers lowest cost of ownership.

Mergers and acquisitions are other key drivers leading to a poly cloud application real estate.

2. Many enterprises are motivated to embrace hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, but what are the most compelling drivers behind this shift? In your experience, how do these drivers differ across industries, and can you share some real-world examples of organizations that have benefited from adopting multi-cloud strategies?

We covered that the compelling drivers include business agility, the need to put large data to use, and cost of ownership drives adoption of multi-cloud strategy. The other key reason is availability of talent pool. Multi-cloud strategy enables building a technology skills pool to deliver products quickly to customers. The pattern of adoption is quite consistent across industries where we see large organizations standardizing on one cloud to cater to Infrastructure as a service workloads. Platform as a service and software as a service tend to leverage the best fit capabilities available across the cloud.

We do see more standardization in SME organizations or product organizations where we see higher degree of cloud standardization. This is logical where product organizations need homogeneous technology stack to consistently deliver on newer features.

We see several of our pharma customers that have benefitted from multi-cloud strategy. Several pharma organizations have created a poly cloud backbone with standard workloads on one cloud while AI/ML and data workloads on another.

3. In your view, what are some common pitfalls that organizations should avoid when navigating the multi-cloud terrain? Are there any cautionary tales or lessons learned that you could share to help other enterprises make informed decisions when selecting and managing multiple cloud providers?

Working with multiple cloud vendors does pose a few challenges, organisations should proactively plan to ensure getting ahead of these challenges. Some of the key challenges include:

1. Cost of data exchange across cloud: Getting data in and out of a cloud environment has additional costs, and if not designed for, can create significant cost escalations.
2. Impact on software licenses: How does software licensing agreements work when you use multiple clouds as each cloud may have a different licensing agreement with OEMs
3. Skillsets challenges: Investing into enterprise architecture capabilities that can operate across cloud providers and technology stacks.
4. Compliance overheads: For a healthcare organization, compliance is critical as we deal with PII and PHI data. With multi-cloud landscape, compliance SOPs, tools need to be ready for a multi- cloud compliance.

4. How can enterprises ensure robust security measures across their various cloud providers, and what role does compliance play in this context? Are there specific strategies or technologies that you recommend for safeguarding sensitive data in a multi-cloud environment?

Cybersecurity is key to cloud native environments.

• Organizations should adopt quality-by-design principles and deploy newer security practices like thread modelling to identify risks in advance and plan to mitigate these security risks.
• Develop processes to continuously perform security assessments
• Implement cybersecurity operations centre for continuous security monitoring and responding to any incidents
• Implement secure coding practices and leverage automated tools for assessment of security gaps in application development.

5. As the technology landscape continues to evolve rapidly, what do you envision as the future of multi-cloud strategies? Are there emerging technologies or trends on the horizon that could further transform how organizations approach multi-cloud architecture?

• Containerization technologies will continue to see higher adoption as these provide flexibility of deployments across clouds.
• Microservices architectures and API-fication of services enabling cross cloud integrations between clouds and SAAS software providers
• Multi-cloud operations technologies on cross cloud security, observability and FINOPS tend to become attractive for organizations
• Data integration across clouds would be a key enabler to a successful hybrid cloud deployment

6. Lastly, could you discuss best practices for successfully implementing multi-cloud strategies?

Some key best practices

• Define and develop a comprehensive cloud operations/ control plane layer that can provide foundational services like security, observability, FINOPS, MLOPS, DEVOPS capabilities in an integrated manner to IT teams. Ensure a cloud agnostic toolset to
• Develop a data strategy and architecture to support a multi cloud analytics and AI workloads.
• Create a team with multi-cloud capabilities to support operations
• Review your SoPs with built-in support for multi-cloud environment. Driving compliance in hindsight can be very expensive