Many organizations see the value of a multivendor platform. It enables taking different approaches to a problem and doesn't put all your eggs in a single vendor's basket.
A number of backup vendors are beginning to tout the support of multiple cloud vendors as a way to appeal to just about everyone. But is multi-cloud backup necessary or even beneficial?
Let me cover this issue by discussing it from a few perspectives.
Backup
The idea of backing up to both say, AWS and Azure, does follow the 3-2-1 backup rule; each vendor represents one of the two mediums required, as well as meeting the one copy off-site requirement. The ability to back up to multiple clouds also enables organizations that are operating in a multi-cloud mode to use a single backup vendor.
Recovery
There is a benefit for those organizations using a multi-cloud operational strategy to minimize egress fees on recovery by backing up and recovering within a given public cloud vendor. So, from this perspective, there is a tangible benefit to using multi-cloud backup.
Recoverability
This question should be asked: "Are you better able to recover because you use a multi-cloud backup strategy?" The answer for most organizations is no. Using a single-cloud strategy will give you just as much benefit, while going multi-cloud possibly overcomplicates both the backup and recovery strategies.
Availability
Even public cloud vendors have outages. Service-level agreements often provide little in the way of compensation, however. So, there can be some benefit to using more than one vendor here. However, given that the likelihood of a public cloud vendor ever going down exactly at the time you need to recover is so small, using multi-cloud backup to offset this potential issue is probably a bit of overkill.
With each of these perspectives in mind, what does the future hold for multi-cloud backup?
It feels like a niche play here -- some enterprise and midmarket organizations will require the ability to use multiple clouds as part of their backup and recovery strategy. But, for the vast majority of organizations, that's not a major concern.
While there's value in multi-cloud backup, I believe its future is going to strictly rely on organizational backup strategy rather than just the mere presence of multiple clouds alone. Time will tell, but for now, multi-cloud backup is an option and not a driver for backup and recovery.
