One ring to rule them all: Best practices for a multi-cloud strategy

Microsoft Dynamics customers (and their solution providers) live in a work with ever increasing options for cloud-based solutions. And that means that managing multiple clouds and possibly integrating them (hybrid), is a critical strategy to embrace and understand sooner than later.

As someone whose role is to ensure that our customers' cloud environments are never down or breached, I have an up-close perspective on cloud management strategies. And in terms of the future of cloud and best practices for its management, I recommend a one-ring-to-rule-them-all approach and a shift to hybrid cloud.

I've explained some of these ideas in the video below, or you can continue reading to learn more about the key concepts.

First things first: Defining multi-cloud versus hybrid cloud.

Before we can talk about strategy, we should define what multi-cloud is and what hybrid cloud is because the terms sometimes are misunderstood in the marketplace.

Multi-cloud is really two clouds, so if you have two clouds that you work with today, then you're in a multi-cloud environment. By the way, multi-cloud could be an on-prem infrastructure. It doesn't necessarily need to be a private cloud like Concerto or a public cloud like AWS or Azure.

Hybrid cloud is defined by bridging those two clouds together, so that they interact together. Important characteristics of hybrid cloud integration are things like high speed private connectivity.

Why hybrid cloud facilitates future workload portability

Another really big component, and you hear a lot about this if you read some of the various technology publications is preventing cloud lock ...