On December 8, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a historic, hours-long outage that wreaked havoc across the U.S. Popular websites and heavily used services were knocked offline, angering consumers and underscoring the chaos that occurs when so much economic activity is reliant on technology from a single vendor.  

This outage hurt the revenues and reputations of companies both large and small that fell prey to the misconception that the cloud is robust enough and relying on a single platform without proper monitoring and data analytics would suffice. The world of data centers is over for many of the primary services we rely on most and it is time for a new approach that prevents revenue loss and improves customer experience, in real time.

Trusting one platform provider is too risky in this perilous environment. Instead, organizations must build resilience by adopting a multi-cloud strategy combined with vendor-agnostic monitoring to provide a more productive and enjoyable web experience. A multi-cloud strategy is essential for protection against outages, allowing organizations to switch quickly between different clouds. Once one cloud is down, they can immediately shift to a second one. Furthermore, it improves the cost management of cloud computing, giving organizations the option of shifting specific services to less expensive clouds.

Vendor-agnostic monitoring powered by AI and machine learning is a key part of the multi-cloud approach because it provides early detection of potential outages several hours before they occur. With machine learning, organizations can identify in real time anomalies in the business well before the internal monitoring system and even the cloud itself can detect it. This early-detection capability allows companies to move to another cloud in the event of an outage, giving them very low exposure to downtime.

There are four key steps to adopting a multi-cloud strategy that organizations should follow:

Leverage Agnostic APIs and DNS Protocols

Many big data service providers today offer their services from multi-cloud domains and agnostic APIs and DNS protocols let organizations use one of the cloud services without accessing a unique API but instead using an API in a very short process seamlessly. The service from this API can come from different clouds. For example, an organization that uses Amazon S3 cloud object storage can also use Cloudflare’s new R2 service that is fully API compliant with Amazon S3. The DNS protocol – already built for a multi-cloud approach – is a standard protocol that allows organizations to leverage multiple DNS services seamlessly.

Embrace Multi-Cloud Cost Management 

Cost management is a major benefit of the multi-cloud approach but to capitalize on it, organizations must implement a service that crunches the cross data from all the cloud services.  Anodot offers a cloud cost monitoring service that gives organizations visibility around how and where they are spending their cloud resources, allowing them to forecast and plan different scenarios that will yield greater cost efficiencies, such as shifting resources to less expensive clouds. Kubernetes is another key technology that plays an important role in multi-cloud cost management, letting organizations run containers into multiple clouds to achieve full redundancy. Forward-thinking companies are also aggregating all cloud cost management data into one visualization to get 360-degree views of cloud costs and usage across their enterprises.

Use CDN Services 

CDN services enable organizations to have full redundancy for the cloud while avoiding cloud “stickiness.” Offloading cloud resources into a CDN service can be served from multiple clouds or data centers. The CDN can cache the data from multiple clouds without getting affected by the downtime of one of the clouds.

Invest in Agnostic AI Monitoring 

Organizations that invested in AI-based agnostic monitoring detected the historic AWS outage several hours before it occurred and were able to move to another cloud, experiencing very low downtime. This early-detection capability is a “must-have” in today’s uncertain environment, letting IT teams take fast action to mitigate and move to other clouds. Moreover, agnostic AI monitoring lets users monitor their businesses from the same monitoring platform even if they move between clouds.

The benefits of adopting a multi-cloud strategy are significant and, with more outages forecasted on the horizon, now is the time to embrace this approach. By following the four key steps outlined above, organizations can build a seamless path to delivering a more resilient, productive, and enjoyable web experience for their customers, partners, and internal teams.