While the idea of managing data and applications using multiple cloud providers may sound like a nightmare to maintain – are there any benefits? One likely benefit is the removal of single point of failure within your business process. Cloud providers ranging from Amazon to Microsoft have faced outages in the past and it surely was noticed throughout the web (Instagram website was unavailable).
By putting your business processes in multiple locations and infrastructure – you will find yourself in the following situation: “Our website and applications are down but our reporting service and HR systems are still up.” Doesn’t that sound better compared to “It’s all down. We’re waiting on the hosting company to come back with an ETA.” Perhaps your reporting service is hosted in Microsoft’s Azure (SQL Server and SharePoint rigged with SQL Reporting Services) with SalesForce.com handling HR information. Just because your corporate website and product is unavailable doesn’t mean your whole company is at a full stop.
Selecting multiple cloud carriers leaves room for creative price management. Perhaps one provider is better for bandwidth while another is more flexible for storage. If the cost of managing your IT infrastructure is really a concern, selecting multiple cloud hosting company should definitely be considered. And there are solutions out there to help manage the multiple cloud environment, such as RightScale.
Further reading:
Amazon Web Services suffers outage, takes down Vine, Instagram, others with it
