Sales and marketing inspiration for vendors and marketers of a “Multicloud” solution

With a multi-cloud approach, an organization can distribute workloads, applications or data across multiple cloud environments. This can offer several benefits, including:

Resiliency and redundancy: By using multiple cloud providers, organizations can spread their services across different data centers and regions. If a failure occurs at one provider, traffic and data can be automatically rerouted to another provider, ensuring business continuity.

Flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in: By not depending on a single CSP, organizations have the flexibility to choose specific services from different providers that best fit their needs. It also helps avoid vendor lock-in, where an organization is stuck with one CSP and finds it difficult to switch to another provider.

Optimizing cost and performance: A multicloud strategy allows organizations to compare prices, performance and services among different CSPs to choose the most cost-effective and optimal solution for each workload. It also allows them to use specific services offered by each provider, such as machine learning from Google Cloud or AI tools from Microsoft Azure, to get the best results.

Managing a multi-cloud environment can be complex because of each CSP’s different tools, interfaces and policies. Therefore, it is important to have a good cloud architecture and management strategy to ensure security, scalability and efficiency.

There are several ways you can implement a multicloud strategy. Here are some common approaches:

Hybrid multicloud: A hybrid multicloud strategy involves both private clouds and multiple public clouds. Organizations may choose to keep some workloads and data in a private cloud due to compliance requirements, data sensitivity or specific performance needs, while moving other workloads to public clouds. This provides a combination of flexibility, control and scalability.

Distribution by workload: This involves evaluating each workload or application and then placing it in the cloud environment that best meets its requirements. It may mean placing different workloads in different clouds based on factors such as cost, performance, security and data needs. This requires thorough analysis and planning to make the right decisions.

Geographic distribution: In this case, workloads and data are distributed across multiple cloud regions or data centers from different CSPs. This provides geographic redundancy and resilience, reducing the impact of an outage or failure in a particular region. It can also help minimize latency for users in different regions.

Vendor-specific specialization: This involves an organization using specific services or capabilities offered by each CSP to achieve the best results. This could mean using machine learning tools from one CSP, storage services from another CSP and security services from yet another CSP. It requires a deep understanding of each provider’s capabilities and effectively managing their complexity.

Knowledge

When selling a multicloud proposition, it is certainly helpful to have some level of technical knowledge. While you don’t necessarily need in-depth technical expertise as a salesperson or marketer, understanding the technical aspects of multicloud solutions helps you communicate effectively with potential customers and better understand their needs.

Here are some reasons why technical knowledge is important when selling a multicloud proposition:

Understanding customer needs: By understanding the technical aspects of multicloud solutions, you can better understand the challenges and requirements potential customers have. This will enable you to offer the right solutions that meet their needs and convince them of the value of multicloud.

Effective communication: The ability to explain technical concepts and terminology to potential customers in an understandable way is essential. By having technical knowledge, you can better guide customers, answer their questions and convince them of the benefits of multicloud solutions.

Build trust and credibility: Customers tend to trust salespeople more who have a good understanding of the technology they are selling. Having technical knowledge can build your credibility and gain the trust of potential customers.

Identifying the right solutions: Technical knowledge allows you to more accurately analyze potential customers’ needs and suggest the right multicloud solutions. You can understand potential integration requirements, data security, scalability and performance considerations, allowing you to provide customized solutions that meet their specific technical needs.

While technical knowledge is important, this does not mean you have to have in-depth expertise in every area. You can work with internal technical teams or technical consultants to address more complex technical aspects and fully support customers during the sales process.

Most importantly, as a sales or marketing professional, you should have a good understanding of the basics of multicloud solutions, be familiar with key concepts and be able to convey technical information in an understandable way to non-technical stakeholders.

Also keep in mind the compliance requirements with recent legislation such as the Digital Sales Act and the Data Act. These state, for example, that data must be interchangeable between clouds, and that strict conditions apply to longer-term contracts with customers.

Be sure to educate yourself, either on your own or through your organization’s compliance officer, about the obligations and restrictions imposed by the new laws and regulations.

In a follow-up to this blog, we’ll discuss practical tips for marketing multicloud.