Navigating Multi-Cloud: How to Support Clients as an IT Leader

Utilizing a multi-cloud approach allows IT service providers to deliver more robust and all-encompassing IT solutions able to meet the unique needs of every customer. The challenge for IT service providers might be how to market multi-cloud solutions. In other words, what arguments should an MSP or Systems Integrator present to its customers to implement a multi-cloud solution? In this article, we will elaborate on the various considerations when choosing a multi-cloud approach, for both IT service providers recommending and deploying multi-cloud infrastructure as well as end user organizations opting for it.

By using the combined advantages of multiple public cloud platforms, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and WS Cloud, Worldstream’s proprietary European public cloud platform, this approach promotes improved resilience, cost efficiency, and performance optimization. It may also help IT service provider clients avoid vendor lock-in while guaranteeing that their IT infrastructures may easily adapt to meet evolving business needs by using the finest capabilities and price structures of multiple public cloud platforms.

MSP Guidance: How to Promote Multi-Cloud Benefits

A service provider may clearly set itself apart from the competition by administering a multi-cloud solution, especially since a multi-cloud solution may present certain challenges for an organization adopting it. Yes indeed, multi-cloud has distinct advantages, but for a successful implementation of multi-cloud, certain obstacles might need to be addressed, something in which MSPs, system integrators, and other IT service providers can play an important role, which will be covered in more detail in another part of this article.

Avoid Vendor Lock-In - One distinct advantage of utilizing a multi-cloud approach is avoiding vendor lock-in. It allows organizations to use the newest and most cutting-edge technology universally by not depending on a particular cloud service provider (CSP). This adaptability to evolving business situations will guarantee that a company will be able to use best-of-breed solutions, giving their staff the IT resources they need to carry out tasks as effectively as possible. Without being limited by the features or restrictions of a single vendor, organizations may customize their IT infrastructures to meet unique business demands by having the flexibility to switch between or integrate services from several cloud suppliers.

Multi-Cloud sales consultancy questions for IT service providers to ask clients:

• How crucial is it to you to have access to the latest technologies and to not be restricted to a single cloud provider?
• Would your current, business-specific requirements be better served by having the flexibility to combine tech features from multiple cloud providers into your IT infrastructure?
• Can the flexibility to quickly switch between or mix features from different cloud suppliers support the way you envision your IT infrastructure developing in the future?

Enhance IT Infrastructure Performance - Multi-cloud techniques may also greatly improve the performance of IT infrastructures. Organizations may opt for different CSPs based on various segmented criteria, including the locations of data centers, geographical areas, and the cloud provider’s capacity to fulfill certain cost and performance standards, to name a few. Organizations could opt for a multi-cloud architecture to enhance application performance via this segmented selection process, guaranteeing seamless and effective operations.

Multi-cloud sales consultancy questions for IT service providers to ask clients:

• Could your application performance perhaps be improved by using unique capabilities of different cloud providers for their specializations in certain geographical regions?
• Do performance-to-cost ratios and the location of data centers affect your decision-making process when selecting cloud service providers?
• What degree of geographical and operational fit do your present cloud services provide, and might you benefit from a more specialized approach?

Bolster IT infrastructure Resilience - Increased IT infrastructure resilience is another advantage of choosing a multi-cloud approach. Organizations depending only on one CSP may be vulnerable to risks like outages, which might potentially interrupt operations at any moment. Businesses may benefit from stronger failover alternatives, security measures, and backup and disaster recovery solutions by spreading their assets over different clouds. This redundancy could be essential to keeping things running smoothly even in the event of unanticipated calamities.

Multi-cloud sales consultancy questions for IT service providers to ask clients:

• To what extent do you believe that your present IT infrastructure is fully resilient to failures, and would you like to have stronger failover measures in place?
• Have you carefully evaluated the possible risks of entrusting your critical IT applications and data security to just one cloud service provider?
• Enhancing security features and failover across multiple cloud platforms, could this perhaps benefit the resilience of your IT infrastructure and continuity of your business?

Improve IT Scalability and Flexibility - In addition to boosting resiliency, multi-cloud architectures may provide unparalleled scalability and flexibility. Flexible storage options for example can proof to be crucial given the exponential growth of data in organizations. Using a multi-cloud approach, businesses may precisely adjust their storage capacity to fit the evolving IT infrastructure demands of their operations, providing a scalable IT infrastructure architecture that can easily manage growth and change.

Multi-cloud sales consultancy questions for IT service providers to ask clients:

• Is the data volume in your company growing at a rate that your present IT infrastructure can keep up with?
• Is your current IT infrastructure setup keeping up with the dynamics of your company data, and could a multi-cloud strategy perhaps enhance its flexibility?
• Would it be beneficial if you could adapt storage capacity on demand and more dynamic to meet instant operational demands and future expansion at reduced costs?

So, prioritizing IT infrastructure performance, resilience, and flexibility/scalability, the use of multi-cloud techniques can represent a strong solution able to tackle a broad range of operational issues. We hope that the benefits of multi-cloud cited and the related sales consulting questions suggested by Worldstream can help IT service providers and their customers make the right trade-offs when it comes to investing in a multi-cloud IT infrastructure. Deploying multi-cloud solutions for organizations and making use of the unique benefits of multi-cloud settings may help MSPs and systems integrators stand out from the competition.

Multi-Cloud Opportunities Offered by Worldstream

Worldstream provides an expending Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions portfolio to clients globally, including highly customizable bare metal dedicated servers, private and public cloud, intelligent DDoS protection to mitigate large and under the radar attacks, colocation, and more. This is all supported by our own proprietary global backbone. With IaaS deployments conceivable in data centers across Europe, we have plenty of options for reseller hosting partners.

As an IaaS solutions provider with a global backbone, Worldstream offers ample opportunities for IT service providers and end clients to professionally shape a multi-cloud architecture, even at the edge. Worldstream offers multi-cloud building blocks such as secure cloud on-ramps from the data center to well-known American public cloud providers. Worldstream’s portfolio provides a variety of infrastructure as-a-service solutions, perfect for designing a multi-cloud architecture. These solutions include private cloud, file, block and object storage, and colocation. Also, our proprietary WS Cloud public cloud platform, powered by Virtuozzo open-source technology, provides a cost-effective European cloud alternative.

This is a three-part article about navigating the multi-cloud space. Visit our website next week for the following section, where we dive into turning challenges into opportunities.

You might also like:

• How to deliver any IT functionality As-a-Service.
• The difference between Bare Metal Cloud and Dedicated Servers.
• What are your options against a growing number of DDoS attacks?

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