The multi-cloud environment has grown increasingly popular in recent years, especially in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it is difficult to find an organization where multi-cloud is not the preferred cloud deployment option. However, just because multi-cloud is now relatively common does not mean businesses are pleased with their multi-cloud strategies or how they’ve been optimizing the worth of the multi-cloud experience.
The reality is that multi-cloud management and support is a difficult task. Application workloads should be capable of moving seamlessly around (or be shared among) cloud service providers and are implemented wherever the best combination of performance, functionality, cost, security, compliance, availability, and adaptability can be found—all while avoiding the dreaded ‘vendor lock-in.’
Leveraging the Multi-cloud Expertise
A significant possible advantage of employing numerous clouds is that enterprises can use the expertise of various cloud service providers, especially if they can dedicate workloads wisely on a per-workload, per-application basis. This necessitates enterprises to optimize the multi-cloud experience by concentrating on the following critical challenges:
Overspreading in operations. Managing multiple separate cloud environments can lead to operational sprawl, resulting in conflicting strategies for different cloud providers, problems sustaining skilled resources for each new cloud type, and an overall failure of the cloud to sustain the operational performance of critical business applications.
Fragmented approach. Some businesses use a fragmented strategy with many technologies and toolsets, and they lack a clear definition.
Control failure. When managing many different cloud environments, each cloud team may have diverse operational models, resulting in disarray, lack of standardization, and loss of control for IT management.
Key Factors in Optimizing Multi-cloud Environment
Corporate leaders must establish how to manage the multi-cloud move, focusing first on what is critical as a business and then incorporating those into the broader operating model. To improve the multi-cloud experience, IT and business decision-makers must be able to resolve their strategy for the following critical factors:
Security and compliance – The data stored in the cloud has a physical location. You should think about where your data is located and who has access to it. As an example:
Does it make sense from a compliance standpoint? The legal landscape and operational requirements might cause changes in data sovereignty requirements.
What about cyber security and resilience? Can you effectively extend visibility and exploit new techniques like Zero Trust, intrinsic security, and shared threat intelligence across your multi-cloud environment?
Cost management – Cost control has various components, the first of which is accurate usage reporting. This can be performed using a variety of techniques that can be integrated into alerts that are issued when cost criteria are surpassed. Because cloud billing can be quite complex, it is critical to collaborate with a partner who can assist you in managing cost control and visibility.
Application modernization – One of the most important elements of success in a multi-cloud setting is to automate as many manual operations as possible. This results in uniform processes and the incorporation of business intelligence with minimal effort. Automation reduces time to market, allowing organizations to bring their application teams up to speed with the services they require more quickly. It enables a company to automate time-consuming and repetitive manual operations, allowing its employees to advance to higher levels of responsibility.
Governance – When it comes to multi-cloud environments, governance is the key to maintaining everything together. Cloud systems and processes serve as guidelines for working in a multi-cloud environment and can be applied to performance management and standard configurations.
As multi-cloud solutions grow more established in all businesses, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that you can optimize your multi-cloud strategy while maximizing and securing your most strategic resources, i.e., your data. Please contact Expert IT Solutions to learn more about how to enhance your cloud experience.
