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Why multiple clouds?
Shadow IT
Shadow IT is becoming a reality that contributes to multiclouds. Hardware or software deployed independently from the central IT team may become large enough to warrant more oversight. At that point, migrating the infrastructure and data to a preferred system (let’s pretend we’re talking about public clouds here) might be out of the question. That shadow IT deployment is simply aggregated as part of the enterprise’s existing clouds—thereby creating a multicloud.
Flexibility
You might find the perfect cloud solution for 1 aspect of your enterprise—a proprietary cloud fine-tuned for hosting a proprietary app, an affordable cloud perfect for archiving public records, a cloud that scales broadly for hosting systems with highly variable use rates—but no single cloud can do everything. (Or, rather, no single cloud can do everything well.)
Proximity
To reduce poor response times for cloud users thousands of miles away from a company’s headquarters, some workloads could be hosted by regional cloud providers that operate closer to where the users are. This solution lets the enterprise maintain high availability and adhere to data sovereignty laws—protocols that subject data to the regulations of the country in which that data is located.
Failover
Multicloud environments help protect enterprises from outages. As a failover solution, multicloud allows enterprises to have an available, highly scalable backup for data, workflows, and systems if—or perhaps when, as Murphy's Law suggests—your primary cloud goes dark.
Managing and automating multicloud environments
IT is becoming more dynamic, based on virtual infrastructure both on-premise and off. This introduces significant complexity around self-service, governance and compliance, resource management, financial controls, and capacity planning. Cloud management, automation, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools help maintain greater visibility and oversight across these disparate resources.
Automation has been used discretely within enterprises, with different tools used by different teams for individual management domains. But today’s automation technologies (like Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform) are capable of automating assets across environments. Adding modern automation capabilities to multicloud environments limits the environment’s complexity while enhancing workload security and performance for traditional and cloud-native applications.
Multicloud and containers
Linux® containers give enterprises choices when it comes to public cloud vendors. Because containers package and isolate apps with their entire runtime environment, users can move the contained app between clouds while retaining full functionality. This gives enterprises the freedom to choose public cloud providers, based on universal standards (e.g. uptime, storage space, cost) instead of whether it will—or won’t—support your workload due to proprietary restrictions.
This portability is facilitated by microservices, an architectural approach to writing software where applications are broken down into their smallest components, independent from each other. Containers—which are Linux—just happen to be the ideal place to run microservice-based apps. Together, they can be the key to taking your apps to any cloud.
Why Red Hat?
Multi-cloud Red Hat OpenShift. Video duration: 4:24
Multicloud helps enterprises avoid the pitfalls of single-vendor reliance. Spreading workloads across multiple cloud vendors gives enterprises flexibility to use (or stop using) a cloud whenever they want. There's nothing evil about having multiple clouds—in fact, it’s a good thing. And open source software magnifies that good. Our open hybrid cloud strategy, supported by our open source technologies brings a consistent foundation to any cloud deployment: public, private, hybrid, or multi.
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