Businesses today, irrespective of their size and specialisation, are undergoing a never-before technological transformation to embrace innovation, agility and sustainable growth. Given these must-adopt success strategies to stay competitive in changing times, nearly every company initially opted for SaaS, PaaS and iPaaS – cloud-based tech solutions, support and integration services – to run different functions as required by their lines of business.
Clearly, the concept of a multicloud environment was out there from the beginning. But when too much outsourcing to a specific cloud vendor started creating operational logjams, the multicloud ecosystem (engaging with different vendors for different cloud services) became globally popular due to best-possible execution and price-performance factor.
Consider this. According to a 2022 study by 451 Research (commissioned by Oracle for its second annual multicloud survey), 98% of the enterprises covered either adopted or planned to adopt a multicloud strategy.
However, efficient multicloud management has its challenges. It takes careful planning, co-ordination and execution to ensure that workloads are placed on the most suitable cloud platforms, and data is appropriately secured across multiple environments.
To delve deeper into this tech trend and address some critical issues, Inc42 and Google Cloud hosted a roundtable titled Startups’ Playbook: How To Implement Multicloud Strategies For Business Success. The session covered a variety of essential topics such as:
- Key considerations for implementing a multicloud strategy
- Risk mitigation during cloud architecture design
- Building a successful multicloud team
The roundtable was moderated by Milind Halapeth, partner (digital & emerging technologies) at EY, who looks after scaling up digital transformations and cloud practices across multiclouds.
The session also saw startup founders and technology decision-makers from different industries, including fintech, media & entertainment, IT and more. Among the noted attendees were Mathew Thomas, chief technology officer of Airpay; Kapil Kapoor, chief technology officer at CredAble; Pradipta Sarkar, product director at Loco; Nimesh Mehta, founder & CEO of Rockmetric; Ashay Padwal, cofounder, chief product & technology officer of Vserv; Aditya Hase, founder of Frappe Cloud; Naresh Deshaveni, VP (technology) at CoverStack; Vimal Kumar, head of product at Arré, and Kiran Kesavarapu, director, customer engineering at Google Cloud India.
Top Considerations For Creating A Multicloud Roadmap For Enterprises
A multicloud strategy is driven by three core business requirements – operational efficiency, cost efficiency and on-demand scalability. Therefore, ventures keen to enter this ecosystem must evaluate several factors, the roundtable participants pointed out.
“As a late stage startup with that portability and interoperability [guaranteed by a multicloud system], we enjoy a lot of advantages when it comes to mergers and acquisitions. Broadly, our considerations span business agility, operational excellence, cost optimisation and technology portability,” said Kapil Kapoor of CredAble.
Talking about the M&A advantages, Kapoor emphasised several factors. For instance, having multicloud capabilities can speed up integrations and separations during M&A execution, allowing companies to migrate and integrate their systems and data without incurring high costs. Additionally, it promotes a quick synergy that reduces the TSA (transition service agreement) timeframe and adds value to target companies by enhancing transaction agility.
Kumar of Arré had different priorities, though. As the product head of an emerging consumer tech startup, he preferred to leverage the cost benefits and the availability of skilled talent while building a multicloud roadmap.
“We looked at every possible solution and [decided on] the cheapest one to acquire and build models around it. As a consumer platform focussing on user-generated content, cloud resiliency is another key parameter,” he said.
“Finally, we need to consider if our people can co-ordinate between so many cloud functions and platforms. Without this skill, the [entire exercise] may become counterproductive.”
Watch the roundtable discussion on Startups’ Playbook: How To Implement Multicloud Strategies For Business Success for more insights into various cloud-based tech solutions, risk management, data management and workload placement. This will help accelerate the tech transformation of your business and help it thrive in the world of multicloud.
