It's widely accepted that most businesses can benefit from adding cloud computing to their IT strategy, especially if they're looking to become more agile and innovative.
Sourcing those cloud services from a single cloud provider might also seem like a smart choice. The reasoning is that it will help reduce the cost and effort involved in delivering the IT your company needs. But working with a single cloud vendor has its drawbacks. It can:
- prevent you from choosing the best tools and technology to stay competitive
- lock you into higher costs further down the road
- open you up to increased risks to business continuity
Recognising those limitations is why more than 85% of large IT organisations will commit to developing a multi-cloud architecture in 2018, according to analysts at IDC.
Here are 5 reasons why we think you should consider adding Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to your multi-cloud or dual-sourcing strategy:
1. Applications and tools to answer a particular business challenge or help you innovate. Maybe you’re looking to gain insights into your data and make better business decisions more quickly. Big Data tools such as Google’s Big Query and Cloud Dataflow, running on GCP, can help you. Perhaps you need to categorise, index and retrieve rich content like video, images and audio. Google’s machine learning tools — like the Google Cloud Vision, Video Intelligence and Natural Language APIs — and Google Cloud Search are leading the way in helping companies work with this kind of data.
2. Appropriate supporting infrastructure for your specific needs. You might need highly available on-demand servers — or be looking for the lowest possible cost for batch processing that isn’t time critical. Your issue may be storing and quickly retrieving high-definition video, or it could be accessing massive relational datasets. Do you need extremely robust networking? Or the ability to handle data arriving intermittently from mobile devices that don’t always have a connection?
GCP offers a wide range of solutions for Compute, Storage, Networking, Big Data, Machine Learning and Security to handle different needs. These products are based on the same technologies and infrastructure that power Google Search, G Suite and Google Maps – all of which are used by millions of people every day.
3. Right open-source and container-ready environments to make it easy to quickly deploy new applications or relocate legacy systems.
GCP is based on the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system, considered by many to be the gold standard for containerisation. GCP also supports development in familiar languages like Node.js, Java, Ruby, C#, Go and Python, and lets you work with a wide range of databases and storage solutions — on premise or in the cloud.
4. Right tools to let you manage all your clouds from one place and build microservices and apps that work across multiple clouds. GCP offers tools such as Stackware and Apigee that let you manage workloads, apps and microservices across multiple clouds from a single place.
5. Contracts that deliver the best value, not only right now but over the long-term. GCP’s simple and transparent contracts and pricing models combine both great value initially and flexibility as your business needs change.
Check out our webinar, for an introduction to the Google Cloud Platform:
If you're already using GCP, congratulations – you're in a great place to start developing a well-managed multi-cloud infrastructure. And you already know that Google's focus on constant innovation means you're working with a partner who will continue to offer you best-in-class products as your needs evolve.
If you're not already using the GCP, we think it's a strong contender to be included alongside your existing provider in a dual-sourcing strategy. As we’ve outlined above, it offers a wide range of best-in-class tools as well as infrastructure that already powers familiar products like Google Search, G Suite and Google Maps, used by millions of people every day. It's enabled companies like Lush and Ocado to succeed by staying at the forefront of their industries. And it makes running multi-cloud operations straightforward and cost-effective, with tools to manage workloads running across multiple clouds, along with per-minute pricing on many services that means you only pay for what you actually use.
As a Google Cloud Premier Partner, we spend our time helping organisations like yours develop the right multi-cloud infrastructure to support game-changing transformations to the way they work. So whether you’re already using GCP or currently working with another cloud provider, come and talk to our GCP experts. They can help you find out more about the advantages of developing a multi-cloud architecture, and the benefits of including GCP in your multi-cloud strategy.