When organizations switch to multi-cloud and cloud, friction occurs. This is amplified by the adoption. Multi-cloud is often a mistake made by organizations when autonomous business units use these technologies without considering corporate standards.
Lack of a holistic strategy for tools, processes, or talent can lead to silos and inconsistencies, as well as longer production times and more manual work. Multi-cloud cannot provide the benefits of agility, cost reduction, and performance.
They create unmanaged risks and increase friction in software delivery instead of advancing cloud objectives. The pipeline problem was addressed, and it was noted that companies could achieve "developer speed" (speed) when they master tools, culture, and product management.
Companies who excel at providing the right tools and culture, as well as product management and talent management, not only deliver software faster but also have significantly better business outcomes. The report concluded that companies who remove "points" of friction and unlock the potential of their development talent could achieve 60% more shareholder returns and 20% greater operating margins.
One thing is that the software development landscape has become more complex every year. Even tools like Kubernetes or containers that are designed to increase flexibility have a steep learning curve. They are just one part of the puzzle. Multi-cloud management is a complex issue that many companies have not yet tackled.
They lack the tools, talent, or practices necessary to manage it. Multi-cloud offers a compelling opportunity for the Development, Security, and Operations Teams to align and modernize how they build, manage, and secure cloud-native apps.
Welcome to multi cloud. You may not realize that your cloud infrastructure, data and applications, and security are likely spread across multiple platforms and service providers. It may have been an intentional decision or the result of trying to solve several problems with the best solution. As a result of this, many companies are unable to capitalize on the multi-cloud benefits.
Multi Cloud can be difficult to manage, even though some organizations are still implementing their cloud strategy. In our Multicloud Annual Research Report, we surveyed 1,420 IT leaders worldwide. 85% wanted to switch to multi cloud, but only 41% had the skills to implement it.
Cloud is here to remain. Multi Cloud is a powerful tool that can help you become a leader in your industry. Multi Cloud is not enough. It's important to keep up with the changes.
What is Multi-Cloud Technology?
Multi-Cloud is the heterogeneous, distributed world of users and applications across data centers, public clouds, and the edge. This model allows organizations to use a combination of on-premises and private cloud as well as public cloud and edge to build, secure, operate, and access their applications across all clouds.
Enterprises are adopting multiple clouds due to several trends, including deploying applications on public, edge, or private clouds depending on their needs, as well as ensuring enterprise sovereignty and securing distributed workers. Multicloud refers to the use of services provided by more than one cloud provider.
Multi-cloud operations and infrastructure provide the flexibility for businesses to run workloads in any cloud they require. They also allow them to migrate, secure and manage applications regardless of the location.
Multi Cloud refers to an organization that uses cloud computing from at least two providers to run its applications. Multi Cloud environments are typically a combination between two or three public clouds, private clouds, or a mix of the two. You can choose from a variety of vendors to build a multi-cloud strategy. This allows you to customize your business and reduce vendor lock-in.
How Does Multi-Cloud Work?
Multi-cloud architectures allow organizations to use a combination of public clouds, private cloud deployments and on-premises infrastructure. These environments do not need to be integrated.
Multi-cloud strategies allow organizations to select their preferred cloud application development services based on factors such as cost, technical requirements, and geographic availability. A company, for example, could use GCP to develop/test environments, AWS as a disaster recovery system, and Microsoft Azure to run business intelligence workloads.
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Why Should You Use A Multi-Cloud Approach?
You can control your costs, your uptime, your latency, and your downtime by moving your applications. These factors directly affect your customers. Multi Cloud strategies allow you to avoid vendor lock-in and find the best cloud services and products for your enterprise.
You're likely to be a candidate for multi cloud strategy if you care about the following:
- Avoiding vendor lock-in and having more flexibility
- Website outages can be prevented by ensuring high availability.
- Develop a solid data protection plan and a risk mitigation strategy
- Provide the best latency times and load speeds for your customers
- Acquiring competitive pricing between cloud providers
- Constant access to performance improvements in the network
- Complying with regional compliance rules
This requires more flexibility and capability than can be provided by a single-cloud strategy, particularly given the different priorities, business needs, and digital maturity of organizations.
Multi-Cloud Use Cases
Cloud platforms and services are being used by enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation.
Accelerate The Transformation Of Apps And The Delivery Of New Apps
Cloud computing is becoming more popular as companies choose to deploy their apps in public, edge, and private clouds depending on the best fit for their business needs and application requirements. Cloud First is now Cloud Smart.
How To Avoid Vendor Lock-In And Maintain Enterprise Sovereignty
Concerns about total cloud spending, data sovereignty, and vendor dependence are on the rise. Enterprises will therefore continue to distribute their estate over multiple environments.
Distribute Services And Applications To The Edge
For industries like logistics, retail, and manufacturing to achieve the next level of automation, efficiency, and customer experience, applications must be placed closer to devices and users.
Supporting The Growth Of The Distributed Workforce
Enterprises must adapt to the reality of distributed workforces. The new hybrid workforce challenge is to secure and manage users and their devices and enable them to be productive anywhere.
The Pillars of Successful Multi-Cloud Applications Platforms
It's not easy to manage a cross-platform, cross-cloud environment. When planning a multi cloud architecture, you will need to consider four key topics. These include staff expertise, intra-cloud communication, cloud management, and cloud security.
The pillars of mastering multi cloud platforms. We advise companies to invest in their resources and capabilities in these three areas if they want to master multi-cloud and reduce risks.
Platform Team
A shift from siloed teams of technology to a platform team that is multidisciplinary and responsible for creating and maintaining a set of services and tools to help developers build and run business-generating applications.
The platform team is the glue between your development team and the IT infrastructure and operations, and security teams. They also manage requirements from the business stakeholders. Platform teams should have a product-oriented mindset, treating their development team as customers and managing the platform as an internal business.
Platform teams are most efficient when they have visibility into DevSecOps, allowing them to make adjustments in real-time to projects that are currently in the pipeline. A platform team needs a data management system that can consolidate inputs from multiple sources, correlate data with an application and create dashboards for key stakeholders.
Platform teams measure what is important to an organization. This includes KPIs that relate to the performance and outcomes of the business lines supported, adoption of platform services, productivity, effectiveness, and reliability of developers using the platform.
Cloud Security
In a cloud-based environment, security is shared by the provider and customer. It also depends on the type of service the customer uses. Multi Cloud environments are complex due to the different approaches taken by providers. It's important to understand how providers differ in their security measures and if they'll work with existing security systems.
Cloud security consultants or managed security service providers (MSSPs) can assist by assessing your needs and mapping a plan to meet your data security requirements as well as the security of your cloud provider. MSSPs are also able to implement and manage cloud-based security solutions for your IT department. MSSPs offer services such as cloud application development layer protection and identity and Access Management.
Cloud Services Expertise
It is not the same thing as managing your applications. You can hire a managed cloud service provider to manage your cloud development, security, and management.
Cloud-Native Architecture Standards
Many organizations start their Kubernetes journey on the cloud, using one of the managed Kubernetes service providers available. After a short learning curve, an app team is up and running. Kubernetes and containers can bring new abstractions to the application environment. This allows for better resource utilization.
To reduce the learning curve for Kubernetes and operationalize DevSecOps, organizations using multi-cloud Kubernetes must adopt platform capabilities that are uniform across technologies. This will provide a consistent developer's interface, standardize templates and create secure supply chains.
For operational efficiency and compliance, it is important to have a consistent Lifecycle and Policy Management across all Kubernetes. These capabilities allow you to create a more flexible, adaptable, and secure production path for your applications.
Cloud Connectivity
Direct connections with multiple cloud providers can be cumbersome and costly. Most organizations use cloud service intermediaries, such as regional cloud service providers or network as a service (NaaS), to connect with multiple cloud providers.
Cloud connectivity providers (also called cloud exchanges) have geographically dispersed networks and have partnered with cloud platform providers like Amazon or Google. One central provider can be used by an organization to access multiple cloud platforms.
Cloud Management
A central management application is needed to manage multiple cloud platforms and services. This will help IT managers to monitor, balance, and administer cloud resources to achieve the best performance while reducing cloud sprawl.
Cloud management solutions may include features like a policy engine to configure and monitor cloud services, process and service orchestration, provisioning of virtual machines and other cloud resources, cost management, and security monitoring.
Cloud management applications that include orchestration are common, but not all. Tools for orchestration are used to control the interactions of cloud services, workflows, and workloads across multiple cloud environments. CloudHealth is an example of a cloud-management application.
Cloud management tools are provided by many cloud service providers, but they are usually only available for their cloud platform.
Transform: Customizing Your Infrastructure
The implementation of your multi cloud strategies can be expensive. It doesn't need to be expensive to become more agile. We will already have worked with you to identify technical debt, budget constraints, implementation skills, and process scaling.
Manage: Overseeing Day-to-Day Activities
It's now time to maintain your multi cloud infrastructure. We know that maintaining a newly-transformed infrastructure is more than just keeping the lights lit. You can use consumption-based pricing to reduce costs and reallocate resources.
Advice: Building the Roadmap
Assessing the infrastructure that supports your organization is essential when modernizing your multi cloud strategies. If you are still running on-premises multiple workloads and have low cloud adoption, or if you want to scale your application, creating a plan is the key to success.
A roadmap will also help you gain better insights from your data and set up more robust security roles for your multi cloud solutions.
Install Guardrails
Modern enterprises must strive to achieve developer velocity. The real challenge is to accelerate software development while maintaining security and compliance. Good governance is a key enabler.
However, well-defined security guardrails can help shift the best practices that were previously invisible to developers and make this leap a reality. Guardrails make sure environments are configured correctly from the time they are created.
Every step of the lifecycle of a cloud-native application must include effective guardrails. DevSecOps uses policy-driven guardrails to focus on quickly detecting and remediating vulnerabilities in the cloud, strengthening overall compliance and security posture. Next, the focus is on optimizing costs and aligning cloud expenditures with application needs and business goals.
Read More: Tips to Improve Your Cloud Application Development Process
What are Multi-Cloud Services
In response to the multi-cloud challenges, a new category of software service has emerged: Multi-cloud services. Multi-cloud services standardize one or more functionalities across clouds with a consistent object model, API, and identity management and have one or more of these characteristics:
- It runs on a cloud, but it supports interaction with at least two clouds.
- Supports interaction with at least two clouds
- Even in disconnected mode, the software can run on any cloud or edge that is chosen by the user. Basic operations are also fully automated.
Multi-cloud services abstract functionality and reduce complexity when compared with consuming native services equivalent from multiple clouds. In this model, the public clouds, data centers, and edge locations all act as "verticals." In contrast, the multi-cloud service acts as "horizontal," providing functionalities across these locations. Multi-cloud services provide several common functions.
Application Services
Databases, AI/ML and serverless, as well as CI/CD tools, dev tools, and more
Security Services
SASE (Security Assessment and Response System), Next-Gen Anti-Virus (NGAV), network detection and reaction (NDR), and more
End-User Services
Virtual desktops, mobile applications device management, and end-user applications delivery are just some of the features.
Data Plane Services
Workloads and data which create business analytics and business offerings
Benefits of Multi Cloud
Multi Cloud services offer many ways to improve the IT agility and flexibility of your company. Take a look at the benefits of multi clouds.
The Best Of Each Cloud
Multi Cloud lets you choose from a variety of cloud vendors. It also allows you to customize specific features to optimize workloads on the cloud based on such factors as speed, performance and reliability, geographic location, security, and compliance needs.
Higher Performance
A multi-cloud approach also offers the benefit of geographically distributing apps and services. By choosing a cloud service provider that has data centers located close to the business users or clients, organizations can reduce latency issues and other performance problems.
Avoid Vendor Lock-In
Multi Cloud environments allow you to build anywhere quickly. Multicloud means you are not bound to one provider. You can select the solution that best fits your business while reducing issues with data, interoperability, and costs.
Cost-Effectiveness
Multi Cloud environments are a great way to minimize your IT costs. The public cloud is less expensive and allows you to scale it up or down to meet your needs. You can reduce TCO and also take advantage of the best price-performance combination across providers.
Innovative Technology
Providers are constantly investing in the Cloud app development of new products and services. Multi Cloud allows you to take advantage of new technologies to enhance your offerings without being restricted to a single cloud service provider.
Security And Compliance With Regulatory Standards
Multi Cloud strategies allow you to scale and deploy workloads while also implementing consistent security policies and compliance technology platforms across all your workloads regardless of vendor, service, or environment.
Lower Risk
Multi-cloud deployments improve business continuity and data accessibility by being less vulnerable to distributed denial of service (DDoS) and single-point failure (SPoF) incidents. Many enterprises use redundant and distributed deployments across multiple clouds for disaster recovery and seamless failover. Spreading your workloads over multiple clouds will help you avoid losing data and applications in the event of a cloud outage.
Redundancy And Increased Reliability
Multicloud helps reduce unplanned outages or downtime because it eliminates the single point of failure. A cloud outage won't affect services in other clouds. If your cloud goes down, you can route your computing to another cloud.
More Flexibility
Multi-cloud strategies give companies the flexibility to decide where and how they deploy their workloads. It helps to prevent vendor lock-in, which is the increased risk or costs that may result from only using one vendor.
This means you're not limited to the functionality or offerings of a particular cloud provider at any given time. You can choose the exact services you need from multiple vendors, depending on your pricing, performance, compliance, and security requirements.
Drawbacks of Multi-Cloud
This includes at the edge, within sovereign environments, as well as in their private data centers. Each cloud platform, with its operating stack, toolsets, and services, offers a unique set of capabilities. These capabilities are not shared by other cloud platforms.
Multi-Cloud is not without its challenges. Some organizations may find it difficult to overcome these obstacles. Multi-Cloud challenges can include increasing management complexity, maintaining consistency in security, integrating different software environments, and achieving reliability and performance across clouds.
Inconsistent Infrastructure
Cloud operational teams are forced to work in silos without a multi-cloud infrastructure consistent across all environments. They have little flexibility to adapt quickly and easily to changing business requirements.
A Constantly Changing Application Landscape
In order to release new features or apps faster and deliver digital business value, organizations must support both the existing and the new architectures of applications. They also need to ensure they can support DevSecOps and performance across multiple cloud environments.
Need For Multiple Specialist Skilled Teams
Multi-cloud deployments can be complex and require a team of highly qualified professionals to implement, design and manage. Using multiple cloud vendors also requires duplicate teams, each with specialized skills. Due to the current IT skills shortage, it cannot be easy to hire and retain experts with the necessary level of cloud security knowledge.
More Clouds, More Complexity
It is only natural that the decision to expand beyond a single cloud provider will increase complexity. When everything runs on a single platform, it's difficult enough to manage applications and environments in a safe and consistent manner. It's even more difficult to manage access across multiple cloud providers.
Inefficient Management
The lack of a consistent and efficient multi-cloud management and infrastructure tool across different cloud environments increases costs and exposes major security holes.
Networking
Cloud networking and security are complex. This leads to increased risk, security holes, and an increased attack surface.
A multi-cloud architecture makes it much harder to enforce policies for access control and protect data. This opens the door to a greater range of security risks. A centralized, rigorous approach to identity management and governance, and security is essential for organizations to avoid data breaches and other security issues.
Costs That Are Harder To Manage
Multi-cloud is often a cost-effective solution for companies that want to cut costs. However, without proper planning and management, it can be a costly venture. Flexible charging models make it hard to predict costs. This is especially true if you do not know which users are going to access which systems or resources.
A Distributed Team
Enterprises struggle to provide a seamless user experience while allowing for more flexibility and choice.
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Conclusion
Our service delivery model is based on the belief that cloud-enabled digital transformation can enhance your ability to innovate, create revenue streams, improve customer experience, and establish new work and collaboration models.
If your organization has adopted or is adopting multi-cloud strategies, you should consider a multicloud management platform. The platform will allow you to maintain control over your cloud accounts.
Platforms should address the four key governance pillars: security, compliance, cost, and operations. You can ensure that your management platform provides an accurate view of your multi-cloud environment by aggregating the data from the native tools of the cloud provider.
The success of your multi-cloud ecosystem depends on the choice of a cloud service provider as your hub. The provider is responsible for accessing cloud application services regardless of platform or vendor.
Cloud service providers that are the best offer redundant and robust communications networks, resilience and uptime guarantees, scalable infrastructures, physical and operational security, and certifications for compliance. It is also important to choose a cloud service provider that has partnerships with at least two major public cloud providers. This will allow you to select cloud services without being locked into a single vendor.
