Companies continue to turn to the cloud for the operational agility, flexibility, and scalability needed to respond quickly to changing business challenges and maximize opportunities. It is interesting to note that many of those companies are learning that there are pitfalls to restricting themselves to just one cloud platform and are investing in a multi-cloud structure instead. Multi-cloud configurations provide many environments so IT managers can choose the best option to respond quickly and effectively to each business requirement. However, multi-cloud management is still new and very much in its infancy.
Your multi-cloud strategy should leverage the native cloud management interface from each of your cloud and technology providers. Begin by managing each cloud vendor individually, so you build up the expertise for future phases. Once you have expertise managing each individual vendor, you can gradually transition to and unify your governance of the multi-vendor or multi-cloud environment.
If you are going to manage wisely, you need to keep track of everything and think like a bookkeeper or an accountant. You will need to establish a method for mapping all of your underlying cloud resources to your business services, goals, and costs to optimize your multi-cloud strategy and share strategy successes with your wider enterprise.
Invest in a cloud management solution that provides easy access to private, hybrid, and public cloud environments. Whatever solution you choose it should provide tools to manage visibility, control, and security. It should also have a single interface that puts cloud services from all of your various vendors at your fingertips so you can stand up cloud instances and burstable scalability to meet business demands immediately.
An effective cloud management solution will also provide you with automatic provisioning that matches your workloads and deployments to various cloud types with the best-suited vendor to handle it based on the operational and cost optimization policies you’ve defined. You also receive reusable templates that quickly facilitate new cloud instances while minimizing production errors and downtime. A good multi-cloud management application allows you to consolidate billing from multiple cloud providers, enabling better cost control and management.
Do not overlook security when you choose a cloud management solution. It is also important not to give away all of your control to your cloud providers. Your IT department should still have control over your entire enterprise. If you try to dump all of your IT resources to reduce your budget, you will not be able to sustain your long-term multi-cloud strategy. Your cloud management solution should be able to provide your IT department with oversight of the entire enterprise environment, including all servers, storage, managed services, network, and billing. A good multi-cloud management solution will allow IT to safely empower cloud users to configure and manage their own cloud instances.
Look for a provider with experience in deploying and managing cloud solutions. Your provider should also have the ability to quickly respond and address any conflicts that emerge when services interact. Make sure your cloud management provider can supply regular and straightforward reports about the state of all your cloud solutions.
Use your cloud management platform for cost optimization. Leverage it for cost analysis of similar workloads when that workload is placed in a different cloud. Keep a close eye on the tool’s provisioning, migration, monitoring, integration, and orchestration capabilities.
Alto9 is a Cloud solutions firm created to help customers migrate to and make the most of Amazon Web Services. Cloud computing is a rapidly changing paradigm that requires a specialized focus, and our Amazon Certified engineers have the depth of experience and know-how to make sure your Cloud infrastructure runs efficiently, securely, and scales with you as your business grows.
