The movement to hybrid multicloud is well under way. But are customers properly protecting their business applications and operations from outages and cyberattacks as they embrace this complex design? In their quest for agile infrastructure using hybrid multicloud, have enterprises fully considered the operational and security complexities?

Hybrid cloud is defined as a mixed computing, storage, and services environment made up of on-premises infrastructure and cloud services (either private cloud or public cloud). Multicloud is simply the use of cloud services from two or more cloud providers. It often rests on open source, cloud-native technologies and may include capabilities that make it possible to manage workloads across multiple public and private clouds from a central console, sometimes referred to as a “single pane of glass.”

With multicloud, enterprises can have compute, development, storage, disaster recovery (DR), and business continuity (BC) spanning a virtualized on-demand environment. Beyond these core purposes, multicloud can be harnessed to support elastic applications such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Multicloud offers price advantages and avoids vendor lock-in, of course, but it also promises a more agile, flexible way to add and remove capabilities as needed. This infrastructure flexibility via the cloud is essential from a business continuity perspective.

During the global disruptions of the past two years, “those companies that had already adopted cloud or could quickly do so were able to sustain their businesses,” says Michelle Weston, director and global portfolio leader for Security and Resiliency at Kyndryl, adding, “from a technology point of view, we saw a lot of innovation and innovative business models.”

But hybrid multicloud environments present organizations with several pressing challenges. For this reason, organizations need to shift their philosophy. If 100% prevention of an outage (whatever the cause) is unachievable, a better strategy is cyber resilience.

Access the ebook here.