Government organizations are starting to realize that no single cloud can meet their wide range of needs. According to the Nutanix 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index1, 75% of public sector organizations agree that multicloud is ideal, and more public sector organizations than average have adopted multicloud as a primary IT operating model (outpacing the global average). Furthermore, global public sector multicloud adoption is expected to nearly double from 39% to 67% in the next three years.

Some leaders worry about the perceived complexity of multicloud —as well as cost, security, and overall compliance requirements. But the right strategy, tools, and partners can help alleviate these concerns and help create a path to new levels of efficiency, service delivery effectiveness, and security.

Multicloud math: Greater return at lower risk

Modern financial theory asserts that a diversified portfolio is an effective hedge that yields greater return at lower risk. Similarly, multicloud, a diversified portfolio of clouds, has the potential to yield a stronger return on IT investment, provide a lower risk, and deliver greater overall efficacy. While this may seem counterintuitive, the “Anything as a service” (XaaS) nature of cloud can be even more potent across a portfolio of trusted Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).

Each cloud brings unique strengths and capabilities in terms of costs, services, footprint, support, and innovation. Moreover, each cloud continues to evolve. Implementing a multicloud portfolio has the potential to optimize the power of these clouds while reducing overall risk.

It’s fair to say that considerations should go beyond just a diversification and cost strategy. Multicloud gives public sector organizations the power to select best-of-breed capabilities and match the right workload to the optimal cloud. In addition, multicloud helps empower government leaders to protect themselves against vendor lock-in, fluctuating costs, and potential external risks. It also broadens access to an ecosystem of strategic partners.

Accelerating the cloud adoption curve

Once you get started with your first CSP, it can be easier to incorporate additional CSPs. Many aspects of the processes, knowledge base, and efficiencies created during the first rollout can serve as a playbook for future cloud engagements.

For instance, technical training can be easier and more iterative. When an organization first embraces cloud, it can make significant investments in training engineers and security staff, in addition to general education for the broader workforce. Subsequent cloud training with additional CSPs is then generally easier for teams to learn and adopt. Furthermore, key concepts are transferable, and some APIs and services are exact duplicates—all of which helps make learning new CSPs easier and cost-effective.

Cloud management efficiency at scale

Standardizing processes at scale across providers is essential to avoiding cumulative overhead costs and complexity. Agnostic partner tools play an important role. For example Kion and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto standardize and automate security, compliance, and financial processes across CSPs. And, Terraform by Hashicorp has an infrastructure-as-code software tool that provides a consistent command-line interface workflow to manage CSPs (even on-premises).

Public sector organizations can use these options to create and maintain cloud environments that have uniform configurations and security postures and can provide real-time security monitoring—reducing costs, boosting overall security, and optimizing resource availability. For instance, in partnership with Palo Alto Networks, Google Cloud built a secure cloud access solution that allows the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) users to access services in any commercial cloud environment, while performing the required security actions of logging, threat analysis, and session control (read more here).

The right partners for your mission

A successful multicloud strategy starts with finding the right CSPs for your mission. Google’s multicloud solutions can help kick-start the journey with open source collaboration and the ability to build and scale. Beyond core capabilities, it’s essential to find a cloud partner that can help serve the core needs of your mission: simplicity and rapid time to value. For example, Google Cloud’s Anthos helps public sector organizations ensure multicloud security, allowing them to manage containerized applications across multiple cloud and on-premises environments from a single management plane.

The key to multicloud success is managing and optimizing multicloud using proven portfolio techniques to maximize return and reduce risk. Ready to elevate your multicloud strategy? Download our whitepaper, 5 ways Google can help you succeed in a hybrid and multicloud world, to learn more about how diversifying your cloud portfolio can help you meet the needs of your agency and its mission.

References:

1. More IT Leaders Say Hybrid Multicloud is Their Future
2. Study Shows Public Sector Organizations are Leading in Multicloud Adoption

Editor’s note: In this blog post we learn how TapClicks migrated to Google Cloud to offer their marketing customers a unified platform for data management, operations, insights, and analysis.

TapClicks is a smart marketing cloud, powered by data, that unifies our customer’s marketing. By choosing to migrate our core applications last year to Google Cloud, we cut costs, solved data-sharing concerns for our customers, and opened our stack up to a new ecosystem of possibilities. 

The core problem that we’re solving for our customers is how to manage their marketing infrastructures data and operations. Life isn’t easy for marketers now. There are 7,000 different vendors servicing this space today – creating much complexity between digital agencies, media, and brands. Marketers face challenges in navigating all of these systems, logging in and out, understanding pacing goals, and managing the flow of marketing data so they can analyze and report internally as well as to their clients at scale.

We unify omnichannel campaign data (250 API connectors and 6000 Smart Connectors ™ ) from a plethora of marketing sources on an automated data warehousing solution, creating simplicity for organizations. Over 4,000 agencies, media companies, and brands use our Marketing Operations and Data Management Platform, which imports data at scale and creates an automatic data warehouse on Google Cloud. Teams can also leverage TapClicks, like our world class Facebook connector, to import data directly into Google Data Studios.  Beyond importing and storing, we also provide data exporting to other Google solutions like Google Data Studio and Google Sheets.  We also create interactive dashboards that let stakeholders and clients analyze their data, as well as automated, multi-channel reports that go out to clients at specified times. So channel comparisons, optimizations, attribution, and calculations are easily performed.  Some of our customers are able to generate hundreds of thousands of individual reports and dashboards for their clients.

Although we may be best known for our reporting and analytics, we also empower teams managing the marketing operations workflow from customers and internal stakeholders, especially at scale. Our user-friendly, configurable system helps manage their orders and campaigns. Through automation of this process, we deliver tremendous amounts of efficiency, time saving, cost savings, and reduction of errors. The combination of these solutions makes up our unified platform, with additional capabilities like marketing intelligence that offers competitive and brand-level analysis. This is a disruptive solution in use by all leading media companies, agencies and many brands.

Partnering for possibilities

We faced a few challenges with our original tech stack, which included a mix of the leader in web services revenue, leaders in high performance data warehousing, as well as vendors on bare metal servers. 

• One challenge was around costs, which were growing. 
• Second, many of our customers work with multiple brands, and are very hesitant to share their data with the leader in web services, who’s often viewed as their competitor. 
• Third, these vendors are more focused on their own revenue rather than a true long term partnership that would enable their customers to enjoy similar success as they have experienced.

When looking at other cloud providers, Google Cloud emerged for us as the front runner. They were competitive on costs, and their native Kubernetes support was superior— a big selling point for our DevOps team. There’s also a movement in the marketing and advertising industry away from AWS toward Google Cloud because of the data-sharing concern. Finally, most of our customers are already using Google Cloud tools, so there’s brand recognition and familiarity there, and easier integrations with their own systems.

Migrating to Google Cloud

Our migration, which took about five months, involved moving a significant chunk of our infrastructure, including our core applications, using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). In our legacy architecture, each of our clients was assigned to one of our virtual machines (VMs), and there was a lot of unused capacity because we had to provision for the max usage. We appreciated GKE’s cloud native capabilities, especially autoscaling, a huge benefit for our web application. We have varying usage patterns during the day, and though our application is mostly used during business hours, there are also days in the month of higher usage, and autoscaling saves us time and costs. GKE also makes deployments much easier, and we anticipate a lot of benefits there for our developer environments. We’ve moved some of our microservices into GKE and plan to move more in the future. All in all, we were able to migrate our core products and the bulk of our AWS spend successfully to Google Cloud. 

We also moved from our other vendors Relational Database Service (RDS) to running MySQL on our own VMs on Google Cloud, which gives us more flexibility in terms of settings and fine tuning. We’re still trying to find the best mix as we’re modernizing our infrastructure, and we took this opportunity to migrate from MySQL 5.7 to 8.0.  

Our next stage is exploring more of the capabilities and services of Google Cloud, including BigQuery, which we’re considering for our own data warehouse. The fact that we could also run Snowflake on Google Cloud, if needed, was another selling point for our migration. 

We’re especially interested in BigQuery ML’s machine learning and natural language processing capabilities, which enabled better predictive insights. Our customers want insights from their campaigns— which are working, which are paying off, where should they invest next? Using our platform, they’re looking not only to generate reporting, but also identify opportunities to improve campaign performance. We plan to use AI and ML to improve those capabilities, so that our customers can seamlessly unlock insight and intelligence from their marketing data and campaigns.

Double-clicking on Google Cloud

For us, being able to deeply leverage and partner with Google Cloud to deliver those solutions on a single stack is critical, and we think our customers will love it. We see TapClicks and Google Cloud partnering at a level beyond what you typically see in a cloud provider relationship. Already, fifty percent of our company is working with various Google Cloud solutions, and we envision TapClicks and Google Cloud as extensions of each other, providing a single, powerful platform solution. 

Google Cloud understands the partnership concept, and their team was able to shine a light on their services and what they could bring to the table. Compared to our previous experiences, dealing with the Google Cloud team has been a true pleasure. Now that we’ve migrated, we’re ready to take our next steps into the services available to us in the Google Cloud ecosystem, and the problems we’ll continue to solve for our customers. Learn more about TapClicks and BigQuery ML.