One must have a clear vision of business goals, constraints, and deliverables as the multi-cloud space continues to evolve and become a mainstream component of enterprise IT environments.
It’s also important to remember that multi-cloud isn’t a panacea for any issue that enterprise IT teams face. Furthermore, since there is no single, all-encompassing solution for all businesses, each one would need to develop their own multi-cloud roadmap tailored to their specific requirements.
Simultaneously, companies must stick to certain best practices in order to ensure the long-term sustainability of their multi-cloud strategy. Here are ten best practices for identifying, introducing, and maintaining a multi-cloud environment that businesses can follow.
Map workloads to cloud services
The most crucial step in implementing a strong multi-cloud strategy is mapping workloads. This allows the allocation/provisioning of the necessary infrastructure components and cloud services to the appropriate business need. It also allows IT teams to create efficient service level agreements (SLAs) based on precise requirements such as data privacy, availability/uptime, latency, rapid scalability, real-time streaming, batch processing, heavy-duty compute, and so on.
Incorporate hybrid cloud concepts
The current discussion of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud principles is a little disjointed. Every long-term multi-cloud approach, on the other hand, must take into account as many IT delivery models as possible, such as public/private clouds, hosting networks, DCs, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), and hyper scale DCs.
Streamline vendor management
The multi-cloud model is focused on a broad variety of technology suppliers, including DCs, colocation services, cloud computing, SaaS software, mobile apps, application development firms, QA/testing teams, SOCs/NOCs, and managed service providers.
Vendor management in a multi-cloud environment risks being disjointed and departmentalized, resulting in a lack of control and increased business risks.
Centralize IT governance
Enterprises require a comprehensive cloud management framework that allows teams to provision/de-provision cloud services, auto scale (new VMs), orchestrate services, control traffic, and track performance metrics such as latency, availability, and so on.
Although cloud-based software and services are the easiest to manage with a cloud management framework, a well-optimized multi-cloud environment will ultimately put on-premise systems, collocated networks, and DCs under one management platform.
Drive usability and adoption
Organizations would need to invest in strong change management strategies to drive adoption as conventional IT environments turn into competitive multi-cloud ecosystems. In a fast-changing multi-cloud environment, IT teams must also ensure that user behavior and standards are met.
Create a robust integration framework
In on-premise setups, the integration situation is still difficult. Due to a range of additional integration points between on-premise systems and data stores with third-party cloud-based software and services in a multi-cloud environment, the complexity increases even further. It’s easier to integrate apps on the same cloud infrastructure.
Aggregating data through various cloud platforms and on-premise legacy systems, on the other hand, often necessitates the use of custom APIs and integration tools.
Benchmark service levels
Over time, every company has created multi-vendor, multi-location IT infrastructure and service relationships with highly nonstandard SLAs. This makes providing a clear range of business services to business stakeholders incredibly difficult.
CIOs must ensure that they have generated a single, reliable, and benchmarked collection of SLAs for all resources when implementing a multi-cloud roadmap (on-premise and cloud). The aforementioned vendor consolidation move goes a long way toward creating uniform service standards across the company.
Build consistent security policies
In a multi-cloud world, data privacy and security will become a major concern. Keeping the business perimeter (including applications, data sources, users, and endpoints) safe will become substantially more difficult with a diverse collection of IT resources in use.
To unify their security environment, IT decision-makers can need to collaborate with managed security service providers (MSSPs) to centralize and standardize security policies across the enterprise.
To unify their security environment, IT decision-makers can need to collaborate with managed security service providers (MSSPs) to centralize and standardize security policies across the enterprise.
Enterprises must overcome three distinct problems when implementing a DR strategy for multi-cloud environments.
Disaster recovery is essential
The first difficulty arises when migrating existing systems and on-premise workloads to cloud environments. This is typically an unpredictable period that necessitates careful preparation to ensure uptime and business continuity.
DR for a multi-cloud environment: Most organizations’ current disaster recovery plans are structured for conventional on-premise systems. Due to a wide range of dynamic parameters (scale, nature of workload, data form, geographical coverage), deployment models (SaaS, IaaS), infrastructure resources (public cloud, private cloud, hosting, etc.), and cloud service providers, multi-cloud environments increase the complexity of the IT ecosystem on several levels (Netmagic, AWS, MS Azure, others).
New-requirements DR (CI/CD): Since multi-cloud environments are so flexible and adaptable, the CR setup must be able to adapt in the same way. To deal with rapidly evolving IT needs, a continuous integration and continuous delivery strategy (which is a common part of DevOps environments) is beneficial.
Leverage analytics for continuous improvement
A multi-cloud environment can produce a large amount of data around performance, availability, downtime, resource utilization, traffic patterns, usage trends, and correlations thanks to process automation, deep integration, and the use of cloud management platforms.
This provides CIOs with a fantastic opportunity to go beyond conventional network monitoring and produce powerful insights from massive quantities of data, which they can then use to improve results.
Although several public cloud providers offer their own network visibility analytics and dashboards, organizations will need to provide a single view of all IT resources, regardless of provider. Using APIs to connect different data sources and build unified dashboards is one way to do this. Some cloud management systems come with a lot of pre-built functionality for this.
Although many of the processes listed above appear to be time-consuming and labor-intensive, they are essential for the effective creation and growth of your multi-cloud environment. It may not be feasible to accomplish all of these objectives at the same time, but businesses can start with a few low-hanging fruit, such as workload mapping, integrating hybrid cloud principles, and simplifying vendor management.
Working with a leading managed service provider like MobiWeb Creations for more nuanced requirements will assist businesses in navigating many initial obstacles and bringing a high degree of process sophistication to their operations.
