By Shrikant Navelkar, Director, Clover Infotech
Cloud computing has emerged as a leading IT service in response to the pandemic and the resulting lockdown. Since then, we have witnessed significant advancements in this technology. In addition to public and private cloud services, we have been introduced to hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and the latest entrant, ‘SuperCloud’.”
What is ‘Supercloud’?
Cornell University researchers have defined Supercloud as a cloud architecture that enables application migration as a service across different availability zones or cloud providers. It provides interfaces to allocate, migrate, and terminate resources such as virtual machines and storage and presents a homogeneous network to tie these resources together.
How it is different from Multi-cloud?
Multi-cloud refers to an approach in which an organisation uses multiple cloud computing services from different cloud providers to meet their computing and storage needs. The main benefit of multi-cloud is its ability to provide greater flexibility, allowing businesses to choose the cloud providers that best meet their needs. This strategy also helps to reduce vendor lock-in and provides redundancy in case of service outages. However, this type of cloud environment can be tiresome to manage.
Here are some of the major challenges of a multi-cloud environment:
-
Complexity – Managing a multi-cloud environment can be complex, as it involves coordinating and integrating multiple cloud providers, each with its own set of tools, interfaces, and APIs. This means that businesses need to get familiar with each provider’s platform and invest time and resources into managing multiple environments simultaneously.
-
Security – A multi-cloud environment can create security challenges due to the distributed nature of data and workloads.
-
Data management – It is difficult to manage data across multiple cloud providers as it can create data consistency, accessibility, and security issues.
-
Cost management – With multiple cloud providers, it can get difficult to manage costs, as each provider may have its own pricing model and billing practices.
This is where ‘Supercloud’ is gaining prominence as it offers the benefits of a multi-cloud environment while also adding a layer of intelligence to seamlessly manage multiple vendors without incurring additional costs.
The Benefits of Supercloud:
Supercloud provides several benefits over traditional cloud computing environments:
-
Simplified Management – It automates the deployment and management of infrastructure, thereby reducing complexity and simplifying management.
-
Greater Flexibility – With simplified management, supercloud provides more flexibility and agility in responding to changing business needs.
-
Increased Reliability – It integrates different cloud environments into a single platform, which in turn facilitates a unified view of all the cloud resources and services. This eliminates the need for organisations to manage multiple cloud environments separately, thereby increasing reliability.
-
Cost Optimisation – It provides an automated optimisation routine across all the compute and providers which means the application will run and consume resources only at the right place and scale.
Conclusion:
As the business landscape forges ahead on its digital transformation journey and expands its digital presence, there is a heightened need to deploy diverse workloads across the globe in real-time. Hence, when it comes to IT infrastructure, decentralisation is the way to go. Whether we call it ‘Supercloud’ or distributed cloud, it serves the same need – simplifying the reality of operating in a multi-cloud world and making it possible to realise the aspirational capabilities of the cloud.