The Antidote for the 10 Complexities of Multi-Cloud Management

The concept of multi-cloud is often drowned in the hype about public, private, and hybrid clouds. But multi-cloud can also be a smart investment strategy for enterprises and mid-market organizations. By distributing cloud management tasks between multiple cloud providers, enterprises can achieve greater efficiencies. They can also establish resilience and take advantage of the economies of scale of their virtual infrastructure. 

Do you have applications spread across multiple platforms? This could include remote offices, on-premises, co-location facilities, software as a service, and enterprise clouds. It could also include hyperscale clouds, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. If you do, then you appreciate that multi-cloud management can be complex. Here are the 10 areas of complexity of the multi-cloud and how to deal with them. 

1. Workload Placement

You must identify the hardware or cloud platform you should use for each specific application. That way, you will avoid chaos and improve efficiency. The IT team should come up with a systematic criterion for choosing the right cloud for each job. 

2. Skills Management

Proper multi-cloud management is impossible without having the right IT professionals on staff. Hire the right people or outsource the work to a combination of cloud service providers and managed service providers. 

3. Network Complexity

The multi-cloud’s complex network is different from the LAN and WAN setups your IT teams may have previously managed. Create a team capable of designing, deploying, and supporting a combination of WAN, direct connections, Internet connections, and VPNs to multiple clouds. You must optimize these connections for performance and cost. 

4. Access Management

Access management on the multi-cloud is a lot more complex than on an on-premises deployment. You need the right tools to monitor your clouds so you can see who is “knocking on the door” at any one time. 

5. Management and Visibility

Getting visibility into a single cloud or homogeneous on-premises deployment is hard enough. A multi-cloud deployment makes things even worse. Investing in a cloud management platform can help you monitor and manage multiple clouds in a single pane of glass. 

6. Reliability and Performance

Ensure your implementation team, SaaS providers, and cloud vendors have chosen the right cloud platforms to support your performance needs. Use the right tools in each platform to enable recoverability in case of an outage or natural disaster. 

7. Data Protection

You need to manage safety copies of your data in all your clouds. Find out if your cloud providers have the necessary security measures in place to protect your data. Poor management can lead to data loss in a multi-cloud environment. 

8. Scalability

You should have a strategy to deal with significant growth in business. For this, you might need a highly scalable multi-cloud deployment. This will also come in handy when business is slow, and you want to scale down operations.

9. Security and Compliance

You need to choose the right combination of platforms for your IT environment to avoid violating data protection laws. Placing the wrong application in the wrong cloud can lead to data breaches. 

10. Cost Management

You need to identify the right mix of clouds to optimize your costs. Many organizations spend more than they need to on their multi-cloud deployments because of a lack of optimization. Proper multi-cloud management can help IT rein in on costs and stick to the budget.

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