Businesses that offer cloud services need to be highly reliable — but, as with any technology, things sometimes do go wrong. To avoid exposure to the risks and limitations of a single service provider, many companies are now looking into multivendor strategies for the cloud services that provide their key business functions.
Although individual cloud service providers are perfectly capable of providing necessary services for their customers, new features are always cropping up, and businesses can benefit from redundancy.
A multivendor approach to cloud services has two main advantages. For one, adding a second provider can give access to capabilities that the business might not get from its current provider. Secondly, adding an alternative service for fault tolerance can mitigate any disasters that might befall a single provider.
The first advantage is obvious. Consider cloud communications platforms. If a business only wants to send SMS messages from the US to the UK, they can use just about any cloud communications platform to do that. But as they expand and want to send messages to Australia or make voice calls to somewhere in Africa or the Middle East, they might find that their original vendor doesn’t provide the services or the coverage that they need.
The second benefit, fault tolerance, helps businesses shore up vital services. Sometimes a CPaaS provider’s messages have trouble getting through to the users that depend on them — and when you’re talking about important services like authentication, dropped and delayed text messages are critical failures.
Businesses can make their SMS-based two-factor authentication process more fault-tolerant by taking advantage of a second provider. That way, if one service fails to deliver, you can quickly switch to the second, which is unlikely to be subject to the same faults.
A second provider also has the added benefit of avoiding a poor customer experience that reflects badly on the customer. This is another example of how, according to Hashicorp, 76% of businesses are finding multicloud environments more appealing, as having a backup service provider helps to provide a seamless service to end users in tricky situations.
Mitigating Risk
At the heart of the argument for a multivendor strategy is the necessity to maintain and grow the business.
