As enterprises work towards delivering more cloud-based solutions, cloud activities have seen an exponentially rise onto the platforms for bringing cloud providers. Many of the IT and network managers across the domain have seen rapid change in the tool kits for network management; even the legacy infrastructure is replaced or combined to bring technology development. To make things simple for IT managers with the change that is going at an elaborate pace, many businesses have included multi-cloud environment over the course of last few years the mixture has led to a pit of confusion, complexity, and cost. Coming to the rescue, we are seeing rapid adoption of more than dozen vendors that are ranging from the IT stalwarts to startups, offering multi-cloud management tools that are designed to bring order, control, and insights for the complete data centers after juggling through multiple cloud services. Dell Technologies cloud, Cisco, BMC Software, IBM, DXC Technology, VMware, Hypergrid, and Divvycloud are just some of the vendors that can provide the required and reliable multi-cloud management. Many of the cloud service providers do let the users have some degree of integration with other cloud providers that will assist in achieving the required degree of management and integration with cloud providers.
Peter Philip, general manager of the Houston Office of Sparkhound, a digital advisory services firm added that operating in a multi-cloud environment makes it difficult task even more of the businesses, but the security is what drives them towards it. The complexity of managing, securing, allocating, and running a cloud environment is complex enough, but adding the multiple environments in the complete process increases the difficulty and risks.
Multi-cloud management challenges
Managing the multi-cloud assets across the multiple environments of vendors is going to be an enormous challenge for the business. Jason Mao, a senior technology consultant at IT consulting firm Ten Mile Square, added that each company needs to manage at least one version of each technology asset that includes configuration, passwords, encryption keys, deployment process and applications that vary at length of each. He even advised that if the company wants to manage the single version of each technology, they would have been using the deployment or redeployment with any version of a production environment such as a container of snapshots for the technology assets. Users will be able to track not only revisions of technology assets but with the added relationship between the assets. The added tasks already pose many challenges for the enterprises that are migrating to a complete single cloud that is giving the users a challenge with growing exponentially with additional cloud services providers.
Businesses entering the multi-cloud environment need to find ways that could be driving the consistency across the complete disparate environments added Varun Chhabra, Vice President at Dell Technologies cloud. It will also provide organizations allowing the multi-cloud environment whether they could be in a complete mix when it comes to cloud-based public, private or clouds at the edge to be completely managed, monitored and automated from the single control pane. Having a multi-cloud environment would mean that businesses will be able to break silos and creates the required transparency across all the assets, no matter where they reside providing the required controls and reducing the maintenance time and effort. Creating the unified management structure was essential in keeping pace when providing the required going spiral with the number of cloud services that are spread across multiple providers. Steve Maclntyre, Vice president and shared security services lead at Fidelity investment services added that one of the biggest challenges is managing the multiple cloud environments that will require continuous evaluation and display the current state of cloud resources, service configurations in a complete way. Each of the cloud environment has its own unique services and capabilities making it extremely difficult to prevent, detect, and respond from the single platform.
With cloud containment that is typically the major problem associated with businesses making them shift towards the investigation of multi-cloud management solutions. The technology can be used to address multiple issues that are associated with various operational requirements on multiple platforms such as the required oversight, automation, and security. Chris DeRamus, DivvyCloud’s CTO added that managing the disparate resources and services that are spread across multiple cloud providers and accounts/ subscriptions that can be an incredible challenge for the system administrators. In such a complicated and dynamic environment, it’s been difficult to get the complete visibility, with a need to added audits and enforcing various security policies and even determine who would be responsible for fixing that. Organizations that have been under constant scrutinizes such as healthcare and financial services are set to benefit most from the multi-cloud monitoring tools that are compliant and governance oversight for business.
Conclusion
With so many of the vendors offering the multi-cloud management technology, finding the right solution that will be abe coordinate a specific required multi-cloud environment can be a very challenging task for the business. The tool should be able to deliver the required universal monitoring and controls across clouds that includes AWS, Alibaba, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes. The tools should be capable enough to deal with the required automation that will assist in implementing the required cloud and container misconfiguration and policy violations that will be allowing the enterprises to achieve the required continuous security and compliance to realize the benefits provided by the cloud and containers.
Having cross-platform and cross-team collaboration capabilities is essential for businesses to achieve complete multi-cloud environment and optimization. It should give the required internal team to complete visibility of what that is exactly being procured and provisioned. The other required features that the tool should be able to provide should include operations dashboard, visualization services, enterprises reporting, and required high architecture diagram capabilities. Scalability is another important approach that gives the tool the ability to scale in a cost-efficient manner giving the cloud service it manages. The tool should additional offering the ability to be configured as code, as it’s been a part of an operational toolchain. The need for tool to offer the complete integration capabilities incented with mature and exposed API that other tools in the enterprise toolchain can integrate with.
To know more, you can download recent whitepapers on multi-cloud.
