Objective

In the era of evolving and emerging technologies, the role of cloud computing is increasing day by day. There are many private and public cloud platforms available in today’s market and its usage too keeps increasing rapidly. Big enterprise(s) are connecting with multiple cloud platforms and they might require to manage their data which resides on multiple cloud storages from a single interface, which we can say as MultiCloud Storage Manager. The objective of this article is to provide the underlying idea and facts about MultiCloud Storage Manager to manage multiple clouds from a single interface.

Concept behind MultiCloud Storage Manager

We can say MultiCloud Storage Manager is an application or a software product which internally deals with multiple clouds storages from a single interface to perform various cloud related operations. In technical terms, we can say that internally it implements or uses all the APIs of supported clouds, while performing various cloud-to-cloud or cloud operations, the corresponding APIs would be invoked or called at the backend.

MultiCloud Storage Manager hides the variances among the different cloud provider APIs and permits you to achieve dissimilar cloud resources through a unified and easy to use API.

The following diagram describes the MultiCloud Storage Manager on high level.

Usage of MultiCloud Storage Manager

MultiCloud Storage Manager basically supports major operations like moving data from one cloud to another, backup of one cloud data to another, data syncing between clouds, load balancing, and so on. It is basically required for the application(s) which interacts with multiple clouds to manage the operations smoothly without taking the hurdle of dealing with individual cloud console or implementations of each cloud APIs into the end user applications.

On a high level, the following user scenarios can create the use for a MultiCloud Storage Manager:

• Like an application stores its application data/objects in AWS S3 or Google Cloud and needs to move it to OpenStack Swift.
• Like an application stores its Virtual Machines in Amazon and needs to take a backup to OpenStack Swift.
• Like an application stores its data to different clouds like AWS S3, Google Cloud, and OpenStack Swift and requires data sync between the clouds.
• Like an application stores its application data/objects in OpenStack Swift and needs to move it to AWS S3 or Google Cloud.
• Like there is a need for an application in which it keeps the similar data on two or more clouds, and in case when one cloud platform provider service is down, the application keeps interacting for data with the alive cloud provider where the further copies are residing or available.

The following diagram describes the usage of MultiCloud Storage Manager in an enterprise cloud ecosystem environment.

A List of a Few Commercial MultiCloud Storage Manager Suites

The following are a few MultiCloud Storage Manager suite(s) that are available in the Commercial market:

Benefits of using MultiCloud Storage Manager

On a high level, we could assume the following as the benefits of a MultiCloud Storage Manager:

1. MultiCloud Storage Manager provides the ease of doing multi cloud operations from a single interface which eliminates the dependency of an individual working with per cloud APIs or with the respective cloud console.
2. MultiCloud Storage Manager provides the ease of doing multi cloud operations from a single interface which eliminates the dependency of an individual working with per cloud APIs or with the respective cloud console.
3. Visible effort saving can be seen.

MultiCloud Storage Manager provides the ease of doing multi cloud operations from a single interface

Reference Links

• https://www.cloudendure.com/live-migration
• http://www.cloudsfer.com
• https://www.multcloud.com
• https://www.cloudfuze.com/cloud-file-transfer