Businesses adopting a multicloud approach need to build the resilience to respond to unexpected disruptions. A cloud advisory service can provide the strategy required to achieve this.
For much of the past decade, the cloud conversation has been framed as a single journey, where organisations leave the data centre and move everything to a single provider. That picture has changed. Today’s businesses run across a blend of public cloud, private infrastructure and colocated data centres, often with more than one cloud provider at the same time.
This is the world of hybrid cloud and multicloud. It is no longer an emerging trend or a niche architecture for large organisations. Instead, it has become the everyday reality of how organisations run their systems.
You could say that the cloud debate has simply moved on. The question is no longer about if we should move to the cloud, but rather how we run the business across several environments without losing control.
“In our conversations with South African businesses, we see the same pattern again and again. Most organisations already have workloads spread across two or three environments, and the leaders who get the most value from that spread are the ones who manage it as one estate, with one set of recovery rules,” notes Willem Olivier, CEO of Resilient Innovations.
In fact, most accidental cloud estates share one common root cause: decisions about where workloads run were made one at a time and usually by different departments, and no one made the effort to ask what the business could afford to lose, for how long and at what cost. Add to this the fact that value delivered to the business has become a more important cloud measure than pure cost saving, and one can see why it has become increasingly important to have a deliberate strategy for where each workload runs, where its data is protected and how it’s then recovered.
Boards now want to know what their cloud investment protects and how quickly the business can be back on its feet after a disruption. A strategy that answers those questions upfront is far easier to defend at budget time, and it gives leadership real confidence in the spend. However, it is crucial to recognise the fact that adoption of a multicloud approach and an effective business strategy around it are not the same thing. An organisation can be fully hybrid and still have no plan for how its systems recover when one environment fails.
This is why their strategy must absolutely consider the organisation’s business continuity management (BCM) and disaster recovery (DR) plans. A deliberate hybrid and multicloud strategy therefore begins with advisory services, which sets the business requirements before any platform or region is chosen.
Olivier explains that an advisory service will place the focus on business impact because knowing which systems are critical and how long the business can survive without them ultimately decides which workloads need the most resilient home.
“A business impact analysis is the foundation of every sound cloud decision. It gives leadership a clear, ranked view of what matters most, and that clarity makes every placement decision that follows quicker, more informed and confident. Their understanding of risk assessment will shape this placement – concentration risk, regulatory exposure, cyber threats and supplier dependency are all weighed per workload. A risk-led view tells the business which systems suit a hyperscaler, which belong on private or locally hosted infrastructure, and which require both,” he says
“In practice, most organisations end up with a mix. The most resilient estates we work with place each workload where it fits best and always keep a recovery copy somewhere independent,” continues Olivier
At the same time, recovery objectives must set the design, determining how quickly a system needs to be brought back and how much data a company can afford to lose, as this information decides the architecture and the DR target. A good advisory service will also be able to assist with data mapping, to answer the data sovereignty question. This is achieved by helping the customer to understand where production data backups and replicas sit, and which laws apply to each. This, of course, ensures that they remain compliant with local laws like the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and backup as a service (BaaS) are critical parts to a broader hybrid cloud strategy, as these services ensure recovery copies land in a separate and independent environment, thus turning a provider outage from a potential crisis into a mere inconvenience.
“In a multicloud world, resilience is not something a business inherits from its cloud providers; it is something the organisation itself designs, tests and owns. This is why choosing an expert advisory service – one that is aligned with global standards and best practices – will assist organisations in achieving optimal preparedness, regulatory compliance and long-term resilience. This, in turn, will ensure that they are able to prepare for, respond to and recover from any disruption,” concludes Olivier.
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