Narender Yadav / March 29, 2021
Multi-cloud deployments are on the rise. Multi-cloud is being embraced by enterprises as they do not need to be restricted to a single framework and can avail greater flexibility. While the strategies related to multi-cloud management do offer an array of benefits, there are certain considerations to factor in to maximize the potential.
The rise of multi-cloud adoption by businesses had Gartner predicting that it will be the most favored strategy for 70% of enterprises by 2019. That said, let’s remember that multi-cloud management strategies are plagued with their fair share of challenges as well.
This post offers a bird’s eye view of multi-cloud management for enterprises. Let us take a look at a few of them:
A multi-cloud management strategy alone is not enough when enterprises want to avoid vendor lock-in. You need to ensure that you maintain portability by picking stacks of technology that are vendor and platform-agnostic. Likewise, you can deploy containers to make the shift from one environment to another a breeze. It also helps to know all the details of the vendors’ services and the pros and cons before sign up.
With multiple vendors in the picture, you can be assured of cutting costs. For this, start matching your workloads to the vendors. If you do a bit of research, you will surely be able to find a more optimized mic of price and quality of services.
Pick your cloud vendor based on what suits your specific needs and workloads. Because there’s no dearth of vendors and the competition is high, you will end up in a win-win situation.
Apart from these steps, you can also find out more about cost optimization tools that allow you to deploy your workloads such that the costs are optimized.
A multi-cloud strategy ensures that when any one of the vendor or data center experiences downtime, all your applications or data don’t get hit. That said, the service levels of each vendor will vary and it’s key to examine how reliable their service is.
You will need to understand the service level agreement better. As a part of the agreement, you can check the levels of uptime and how you will get compensated if the vendor fails to adhere to it. Vendors may have different SLAs for different types of use-cases and workloads, so you need to make an informed decision.
Next, bake a backup plan into your day to day strategy and ensure that the Cloud strategy factors that in. Also, make sure that you also take the location of the cloud vendor and the data centers into consideration to strike the perfect balance between accessibility, speed, reliability, and cost.
Cloud security is a key focus area for all the major players out there. But that doesn’t mean that you should leave it to the cloud vendors. Reviewing the regulations or laws mandated at different geographical locations is important to know exactly what you are protected against.
Similarly, make it a rule to restrict access to your data and applications. Data encryption is mandatory. So is deploying adequate security measures. That said, you can also choose the private cloud route when the public cloud will not suffice for meeting your security needs.
Enterprises that adopt multi-cloud data management must consider the compliance challenge. If this is an important concern for you, look to simplify the monitoring and control across various cloud ecosystems.
Additionally, it may become necessary to integrate your existing business systems with the cloud to manage the operations efficiently from a consolidated management console.
And that’s not all. You will need to consistently track all the cloud instances as well as services to provide the level of transparent reporting that many compliance procedures demand.
The last point on our list is to understand how to manage multiple providers efficiently. You can choose to rely on automation tools. Today, you could apply modern multi-cloud management tools for API management, integrating, and selecting a cloud service broker.
Since cloud environments constantly evolve, make it a point to keep track of how you are utilizing this new-age technology. Do remember that your business goals will also change and therefore, what works today may not work tomorrow. This is why you need to build a strong foundation early on by selecting the right multi-cloud management strategy. Of course, you will need to keep revisiting it -that’s just the nature of the multi-cloud beast!
