Imagine this….

It is the last few days before Christmas. You are a parent of two young kids who have behaved reasonably well this year. So, Santa will bring a gift for them. Well, guess what – you don’t need to worry anymore about what to get or where to get it from. I already made that choice for you.

You are buying a baby Yoda plush toy for each of the kids

You will purchase it from Amazon.com

If your child does not like it, too bad. You cannot exchange it. You have to spend again to buy another toy.

Picture Courtesy from Amazon.com

Ok, I admit this sounds ridiculous! Even if THE Mandalorian has made Grogu (Sorry for the spoiler – baby Yoda) quite popular and many people like to purchase gifts from Amazon. But you would like a choice, right? Of course, you would!

Instead of Amazon, you may want to buy a cheaper version of the same toy from Walmart.com OR an artistic version on Etsy.com. Alternatively, you may want to walk into a local retail store and pick up a similar toy. Maybe you select a lightsaber from Walmart.com AND a baby Yoda from Amazon.com because that is what each of your children wants. But you don’t want this decision automatically made for you.

Why is this analogy any different for cloud offerings? It is pretty much the same thing. Maybe you like cloud-managed solutions but it doesn’t mean you need to select the public cloud. And, if you pick public cloud, it does not mean you need to default to AWS. If you pick the on-premise option, you shouldn’t need to lose out on product capabilities. You get the drift?

Why Should Multi-Cloud or Even Hybrid Cloud be a MUST in your RFPs?

A multi-cloud offering provides agility to meet the ever-changing business needs. Here are a few customer inputs that we have heard:

1. You can align the choice with the corporate policy of the cloud-hosting provider. In the case of M&A, you can change direction as quickly as you need to realign.
2. If you are a retailer, maybe you don’t want to store any of your data in AWS. You can select GCP or Azure.
3. Maybe you are a best of breed customer, therefore you can pick Google for the well-known AI/ML services, AWS for mature functions (such as DNS caching), or maybe you select Azure because of all the existing relationship with Microsoft around Office365.
4. Today you may manage your own data center and want to host the capabilities in your private datacenter but tomorrow you may want to move to public.
5. You may want to split the deployment across two cloud vendors, so you are not dependent upon the uptime of one of the vendors.
6. Maybe you select one public cloud vendor because they are the only ones to host a regional data center in your country and thus have the lowest latency or for data. Maybe it is related to data-governance reasons.

A recent study shows that multi-cloud is not a question of “if” but a question of “how many”.

With Extreme Networks, you have a choice:

1. Deploy with public-cloud (GCP, Azure or AWS), private-cloud, or local-cloud.
2. You can move from one to the other at any time – from public to private, from private to local, from Google GCP to Microsoft Azure. You can do this in a hitless manner. The same features, functionalities, user-interface, and license applies.
3. None of the cloud architecture components are proprietary. This allows us to pick-and-choose the best for you.
4. If any of the cloud providers are down, we can simply host a backup server with another cloud provider.

The bottom line is it is your choice! Don’t let your vendor take it away from you. For more details of how Extreme implements this capability, check out our white-paper.

P.S. Don’t forget to order gifts for your well-behaved kids in time!

This blog was originally authored by Jeevan Patil, Senior Director, Product Management