How a multicloud architecture can deliver flexibility

A multicloud architecture can deliver a competitive edge for businesses

How can businesses position themselves to access the best products and capabilities to deliver transformation and help them succeed during a period of rapid change?

For many businesses, the answer is a multicloud strategy that extends the capacity and capabilities of IT without up-front capex investments, and supports incremental modernization of applications and processes as resources permit. 

Take a considered approach

A genuine multicloud strategy does not entail taking an ad-hoc approach to engaging cloud providers and Software as a Service products.

An ill-disciplined approach simply adds more complexity without delivering cost optimisation, high availability, improved delivery velocity and other benefits. 

A multicloud strategy is a considered approach that allows businesses to make flexibility integral to IT architectures.

Leading Australian bank, NAB, is one institution embracing the opportunity a multicloud strategy presents to transform effectively. “At NAB, we’re in the midst of a company-wide digital transformation to simplify our business and improve the experience customers have with us,” says Steve Day, Executive General Manager Infrastructure, Cloud & Workplace, NAB. “Technology is both an enabler and foundation in our transformation and our multicloud approach, incorporating Google Cloud services, is a key differentiator for us.” 

Focus on capabilities that deliver success

Taking this approach involves focusing on the capabilities needed to deliver success rather than on products and cloud providers. For example, will a business need data warehousing with integrated machine learning? Will it need pre-built artificial intelligence capabilities? Will it want assured workloads preconfigured for compliance with security standards?

Once they identify those capabilities, they need to know that they can be made available securely and configured in a controlled way.

They will also need to deploy consistently based on the chosen configurations and have a clear view of the infrastructure state.

In addition, businesses will need the ability to make rapid changes to infrastructure, but manage change from an existing environment – whether on-premises, hosted or multicloud – in a considered way.

Businesses that tick all of these boxes can successfully scale digital processes and deliver services in  high-performance fashion.

Delivering a successful multicloud strategy also means being able to manage across all clouds. Moving workloads around is also critical, as is the ability to write software once and deploy onto any cloud.  Containerisation of applications – where an application can be packaged into a container along with all the frameworks it depends upon and then run on any infrastructure that supports the container type – has rewritten the scalability conversation.

Businesses now no longer need the resources to scale heavyweight virtual machines; they can spin up 1,000 instances of a containerised application in seconds on available cloud infrastructure to meet demand. 

Furthermore, businesses need to minimise manual management involving multiple platforms.

They should look for capabilities to orchestrate container management across multiple clouds, and work with data at speed from data lakes hosted in environments optimised for cost, scalability and capability. 

When developing a multicloud strategy, businesses need to maximise flexibility for the future and extract full value from cloud services and associated ecosystems. This approach will help define them as digital leaders.  

Learn more here about how the Google Anthos hybrid and multicloud application platform can power your multi-cloud strategy  

Supplied by Google

About Matt Pancino:

Matt joined Google in June 2020 as Director, Industry Solutions Practice, Asia Pacific. Prior to this he had spent four years at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), most recently as the Chief Technology Officer, having previously been Chief Information Officer of the Retail Bank. As Chief Technology Officer, he was responsible for delivering the technology roadmap to ensure CBA maintained its global leadership in Technology and Operations.

Prior to joining the CBA Group, Matt was Chief Information Officer of Suncorp Group and Chief Executive Officer, Suncorp Business Services, where he managed operations and technology for Australia’s largest insurance company. He has also worked across a range of industries, including telecommunications and entertainment, and has extensive transformation experience.

Matt has significant experience in leading organisations through large scale technology change programs (core system modernisation, agile ways of working, infrastructure redesign, cybersecurity, technology operating model design and strategy) that enable digital and analytics transformations.