Companies in every sector are increasingly taking a multi-cloud approach to their infrastructure to take advantage of various applications needed to support their business. However, managing multi-cloud environments can be a challenge for any companies, one that requires careful planning, coordination and optimization.
With multiple cloud platforms in use, effective management becomes crucial to ensure optimal performance, cost efficiency and security across the entire infrastructure.
One of the fundamental aspects of managing multi-cloud environments is developing a comprehensive strategy and finding the essential skills or competences an organization needs. This involves understanding the organization's requirements, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of various cloud providers, and determining the most suitable deployment models. The strategy should align with the organization's goals, considering factors such as scalability, flexibility and data sovereignty.
Silverlinings asked Mark Leake, senior director of product marketing in the Modern Application and Management Business Group at VMware, and Premkumar Balasubramanian, senior vice president and CTO for Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara, about the top skills needed to manage a multi-cloud environment. Their responses are edited for brevity and clarity.
Managing Cost
Organizations should understand their spend across multiple cloud providers and where that can be flexible, especially when it comes to cloud consumption in the public cloud. That spend shouldn’t just be a line on a spreadsheet: company executive should understand where the spend can be optimized.
This means asking critical questions about what business outcomes are benefiting from the money being spent. Most public cloud providers offer flexibility in pricing and performance, but executives should know their business needs.
This is where vendor management can be key — create a plan for understanding how the company’s technology vendors might overlap on applications or services.
Taking an operations-style approach to cloud cost management is key to financial discipline. Cloud costs can quickly rise if not well maintained but, to do that, an organization need the skills and knowledge across environments to help make these decisions.
Optimizing Performance
With managing spend comes reaching ideal performance for workloads and applications. An organization can pay maximum cost to reach maximum performance but that might lead to wasted resources at least some of the time.
Ideally, care workloads and applications are performing and available whenever they’re needed but that comes with a tradeoff of costs. Executives should match workloads and business needs with their cloud services, ensuring that the infrastructure serves the former.
Many companies moved to adopt cloud infrastructure for its improved adaptability, agility and growth. Executives should take full advantage with on-demand consumption models.
Maintaining Configuration
Having your multi-cloud environment in a compliant, secure configuration is key. Also key here is knowing when an organization may be drifting away from a compliant configuration—this requires a governance strategy.
A cloud operating model can ensure business units aren’t unnecessarily siloed, allowing applications and solutions to be deployed across departments. This can also mean managing the constant changing scale of cloud, dealing with thousands of cloud accounts across multiple public clouds and dozens of individuals accessing them.
Set access rights for developers and users to ensure they can get what they need and not beyond. Allow creativity for developers to innovate but manage risk. This means your governance strategy needs guardrails.
No two clouds are the same as no two organizations are the same. It’s critical for an enterprise to optimize the cloud environments it has across the entire organization to find the best option for each use case.
Achieving Security
For some enterprise, like those in the financial or health care space, security is top of mind when it comes to data storage and access. This might trump other key skills, such as performance or cost, for an organization that prizes security above all — although that depends on how your multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment is deployed.
Once an organization crosses into two or more cloud environments, it will need to eliminate redundant processes while maintaining a baseline defense strategy that holistically protects its data through a common framework. This takes talent, however, to identify and deploy the best possible solutions from each cloud provider in relation to the organization’s needs.
Those with high security needs may not want some, or all, their data in a public cloud, but they may want to take advantage of certain cloud-based applications. This means having a hybrid cloud environment that has a single governance strategy overtop that protects both.
Security needs to be built into the applications as well as the way an organization manages and maintains their cloud environment. There is network security like a firewall and there’s operational security that requires training and oversight from IT. Like the hybrid cloud it needs to work together.
Automation
Automation is often seen less as a skill and more of a goal, but organizations should understand this as a key competence needed to manage hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. Automated delivery of services offers the c-suite the luxury of focusing on core business priorities instead of IT.
A key element of automation is self-service access and the automated deployment of services to company developers and teams. This offers the ability to bring up cloud environments in an automated fashion and to maintain consistency through automation across these different cloud environments.
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