As enterprises continue their push into the world of cloud computing, they face complexities in designing robust architectures that leverage "Multi Cloud Services" or MCS. Organizations today are embracing the synergy of multi cloud services and want to adapt collaboration where they not only have the option of hosting a private cloud or moving to public cloud but also retain the capability of managing on their own. This demands development of strong engines which can control the entire cloud framework and provide flexibility to the organizations.

MCS today are not only able to assist customers in movement of production workloads, but also in shifting the risks. The role of MCS begins at a strategic level wherein, it examines the viability of moving the service to cloud by deeply understanding the specifications of the underline service or workload like expected average and peak resource utilization. It also helps in defining various operational costs and tracking the changing variable rates. It provides organizations with the ability to add or remove resources on need basis and with a lead time of minutes rather than weeks. This allows matching resources to workload much more closely and provides the organizations with the ability to transfer risk related to resources. Based on holistic evaluation of each workload’s attributes, MCS can help organization choose the most appropriate delivery vehicle for their workloads, thereby ensuring effective movement of their production workloads.

I strongly believe that for optimum usage of MCS, organizations also need to have the ability to auto-provision cloud services, analyze the services in terms of performance and availability and even govern the services using preset policies. Software such as cloud brokerage can provide automated selection of the right cloud services to provide the best performance, reliability, security, and cost efficiency. Organizations can then benefit from the interoperability of public and private cloud-based services, common management, governance and security services. Another critical topic which I often come across is 'security' of data while using multi cloud services. Although there are no fundamental obstacles to making a cloud-computing environment as secure as the vast majority of in-house IT environments, encrypting data before placing it in a cloud will be even more secure than unencrypted data in a local data center.

I believe that attractive engines which can control the entire cloud framework will provide organizations the ability to start small and increase hardware resources only when there is an increase in their needs & hence pay only when they need it. It will also provide them the ability to pay for use of cloud resources on a short-term basis as needed and release them as needed, thereby bringing in variabalization and adaptation to usage pattern.

MCS is still an evolving service and when it comes to a hybrid cloud scenario it should have the capability to rapidly scale down and scale up the resource availability and have strong integration with multiple sources of resources. However, I believe that the opportunities in this space are immense because of the growing focus on cloud services by organizations. There are few issues and challenges of MCS which needs to be worked on and corrected to make this a fully successful cloud service delivery mechanism.

Suresh Kakka - Head - Pre-Sales, Data Center Practice, GIS, Wipro, Ltd.

Suresh Kakkar is the Pre-Sales Head for the Data Center Practice in GIS. He has performed key roles in defining solutions for clients in large Global Outsourcing deals. With more than 17 years of rich experience in Technical Pre-Sales, Technology Consulting, Architecting Enterprise Solutions & Business Development has taken several initiatives to develop practice around DC Infrastructure and Cloud Services. He is also a featured speaker in various CXO events.