Prior to the advent of cloud computing, enterprises had all their data and applications with on-prem data centers and hosting providers. To scale, companies had two choices: Expand their existing data center capacity – an expensive and time-consuming proposition or expand with hosting providers – again an expensive approach. With cloud these inhibitors to scaling, plus the availability of cloud-managed SaaS applications, the growth and adoption of cloud computing is exponential. Many enterprises are now referring to these early journeys as Cloud 1.0 or Cloud 2.0, focused on lift & shift of applications and data from on-prem to the cloud, building secure extensions of their private networks and leveraging cloud provider data processing and analytical services. However, we now appear to be at an inflexion point, enterprises are coming to the realization that:

(a) Not all workloads will move to the Cloud, research from IBM shows up to 55% of workloads will remain on-prem. Why? security, compliance, and investment in large scale on-prem infrastructure which is as cost-effective as operating in the Cloud.

(b) The dread of cloud provider unlock in, as cloud providers continue to extend their services and products outside of the initial Infrastructure as a Service (compute and storage) to databases, middleware, security etc, a plethora of services that are tied to ONE provider and do not interoperate with other cloud providers. Enterprise fear of “lock-in” to a cloud provider, once in, impossible to untangle, losing their ability to negotiate reduced pricing and inability to benefit from different cloud provider services to drive innovation and reduce cost.

We believe enterprises are now embarking on a cloud 3.0 future, a horizon that requires “interoperability” and “orchestration” at the very heart of any strategy and architecture. A future that will require on-prem applications and data, to operate across MULTIPLE cloud providers, allow Enterprises with optionality and flexibility to meet their business objectives, and to control the influence and dominance of the cloud providers – in our view to take back control!

A multi-hybrid cloud strategy provides the freedom to choose multiple cloud service providers based on the data workload and end-user requirements. Multi-hybrid cloud strategy provides benefits such as - no vendor lock-in, improved data workload management, enhanced data security, and improved ROI with a mix of on-prem data centers and multiple different private and public clouds.

Defining Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud

Before we delve into the benefits, let’s first understand the difference between Multi-Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud strategy.

Multi-Cloud:

Multi-cloud strategy includes more than one public cloud provider, usually to perform different data and application operations.

Hybrid Cloud:

Leverages the sunk costs and infrastructure in on-prem data centers and applications /data and ensure security and compliance requirements are not compromised. But now needs to seamlessly interoperate with multi-cloud services.

What are the benefits of a multi-hybrid cloud strategy?

• Cost Optimization

By utilizing multiple cloud providers, enterprises benefit from different pricing options for computing and storage resources. Enterprises can allocate IT resources to the most cost-effective provider based on storage and workload needs.

• Performance Optimization

Enterprises can run data workloads in multiple cloud environments as per the specific use case requirements. Enterprises can leverage more than one public cloud provider for specific data workloads and optimize performance and scalability at controlled costs.

• Avoid Vendor Lock-in

One of the topmost priorities of enterprises is to avoid vendor lock-in. If their needs are not met, organizations want the freedom to switch cloud service providers. Businesses that use a multi-cloud strategy have options and are not restricted to use a single cloud service provider.

• Risk Mitigation

If a vendor experiences an attack or infrastructure downtime, a multi-cloud user can quickly switch to another cloud service provider or fall back to a private cloud.

• Innovation

Benefiting from the investments and strengths of each Cloud provider to drive innovation, for example Google GCP is recognized as a leader in AI / ML services due to their heritage.

• Security

Enterprises are concerned about losing control over critical data and applications in the cloud environment. In a hybrid cloud strategy enterprise can have an on-prem data center or a private cloud to host their critical data or applications to have more security and control over data assets.

• Cloud Bursting

Cloud bursting is a way to manage data workload with a combination of public and private clouds. If an enterprise has used the private cloud to its full capacity and there is an increase in data traffic, the enterprise can route the access data traffic to the public cloud without any service interruptions. A hybrid cloud provides better workload management and cost efficiency with cloud bursting.

Case Study:

Background:

A Top 5 US Healthcare Insurance provider, with 90k+ employees, has adopted a Cloud 3.0 strategy with multi-cloud providers and a hybrid cloud.

Challenges:

The client was struggling in their cloud data migration journey with legacy ETL tools and on-premises Data Lake. Additionally, they were finding it challenging to control the costs of cloud operations due to a lack of visibility of cloud resource usage. The absence of proactive monitoring and alerting services was leading to cloud resource wastage. Data processing was taking a lot of time with clients’ home-grown and incumbent tools, and they were facing difficulties to scale and automate their data processing tasks.

The client faced the following challenges:

• Manual processes and the absence of automation for data operations
• Unclear service level objectives and indicators
• Dependency on on-prem data lake and ETL tools impacting the speed of data orchestration and migration
• legacy tools take over 25 hours to process
• Higher data processing time with existing infrastructure

Solution:

After evaluating incumbents, third-party software, and cloud provider tools the company selected Modak Nabu™, a data engineering platform that accelerates the ingestion, profiling, and migration of data to any cloud provider.Modak Nabu™ accelerated clients’ cloud migration journey and reduced cloud costs by-

• Automated creation of monitoring dashboard
• Removing the dependency on on-prem Data Lake and legacy ELT/ETL tools
• Automation of Data pipelines to accelerate the data orchestration in the cloud
• Periodic review and monitoring of unused resources
• Automated restart of services along with RCA
• Creation of runbooks for every issue which reduces the issue resolution time by 50%

Impact:

With Modak Nabu™ the enterprise client implemented Cloud 3.0- a Hybrid/Multi-cloud strategy and accelerated the data movement workflow from on-prem to the cloud. Modak Nabu™ optimized cloud operation costs and improved data operations and services.

The enterprise client recognized the following benefits:

• Cost optimization: Savings of 65% by removing unused resources from cloud providers' infrastructure
• Real-time Monitoring of all data engineering services
• Average data processing time was improved by 85% from hours to minutes
• Eliminated the dependency on legacy ELT/ETL tools
• Proactive alerting results in quicker issues resolution
• Saved time and resources by Automated Data operation
• Resolved 95%+ issues within SLA with SLI and SLO monitoring