Using a multi-cloud approach to reach long-term business goals more efficiently requires integrating and redistributing workloads across multiple public clouds while using a single management platform to manage all of these clouds. Setting up a process that uses multiple clouds not only enables you to take advantage of what each cloud does best, but also offers your company the flexibility and responsiveness it needs to bring products to market faster and meet customer needs more quickly.
Using a multi-cloud strategy does have some benefits, but there are also a lot of challenges that need to be addressed. Some of these are the possibility of higher costs and concerns about security, as well as the difficulty of managing infrastructure across multiple platforms. These issues are not exclusive to multi-cloud environments. They appear whenever an IT environment expands beyond the limitations of on-premises infrastructure. Therefore, we have highlighted the key areas to assist you in effectively implementing a multi-cloud strategy.
Preparation Is Key
Make a map of your current infrastructure to see where a multi-cloud environment would be most useful, especially when employing a cloud migration. Rather than randomly assigning portions of your organization to a second or third cloud to take advantage of the benefits of a multi-cloud environment, you should first evaluate the areas of your operation that stand to benefit the most from employing multiple clouds. If you map out your current infrastructure, you will have a better understanding of where opportunities exist and where controls may be installed to reduce escalating costs and security issues.
Automate Wherever Possible
Identify where there are opportunities to automate time-consuming processes, such as networking, patching, and vulnerability scanning, in line with the standardization of tools and methods used in multi-cloud administration.
In addition, you should think about automating uniform rules that apply to all of the clouds in your ecosystem. Policies for virtual servers, workloads, traffic flows, data storage, security, compliance, and reporting are all in this category. Having a single, uniform configuration for all of the infrastructures in your environment makes it much easier to deploy updates and changes since the changes spread smoothly throughout your environment.
Process automation may help remove human error and free up your team’s time so they can focus on tasks that provide more value to your organization. Handling several clouds is difficult enough without adding onerous and repetitive tasks to your workflows.
Don’t Take Security and Compliance for Granted
When the finer details of security are overlooked, issues and breaches may occur. It may be challenging to implement a uniform set of security rules in a system with many clouds since each cloud provider has its own set of specific security technologies in place.
If you want to help standardize things and lower security risks, you should work with a cloud hosting company that offers security solutions that work for any cloud. This cloud partner will assist you in developing and applying security policies across all of your cloud infrastructures, therefore guaranteeing that your data and workloads will be safeguarded consistently and predictably as they migrate from cloud to cloud.
Ask about your cloud hosting partner’s compliance licensing and certifications to verify that they can readily help you satisfy your compliance standards.
Adopt a Step-by-Step Migration
Migrations to the cloud take time and resources, especially when there is a lot of work to do. Yet, patience and a realistic approach are essential for the most effective migration approaches.
The best strategy is to assess each scenario separately. The phrase “cloud first” or “cloud smart” refers to a set of guiding principles that businesses may use to determine which alternative is appropriate for a certain workload or application.
It is an alternative to the massive technique of “shifting everything as quickly as possible to a cloud service” (also known as “shutting everything down”).
Put It in a Container
Containerization is crucial in configurations that employ several cloud providers. Programs and databases may be moved across clouds if they are bundled in containers beforehand. Due to its mobility, your DevOps teams can test applications in a variety of cloud settings. You can also use technologies like Kubernetes and Docker to optimize databases and applications in multi-cloud environments. These systems enable you to optimize databases and applications by automating workloads across cloud providers.
Containerization and mobility both have a lot of important benefits, and being able to better control costs is one of them. Developers may want to use native technology that is available in a certain cloud, but doing so could lock you into an expensive long-term contract with a single provider. Containerization allows you to maintain the same codebase when transferring an application from one cloud to another or even back on-premises. After doing so, you will have the option to properly compare the pricing of the different cloud providers.
