How to Overcome the Complexity of a Multi-Cloud Approach
Hiring the right cloud providers is just the beginning of your multi-cloud journey.
Challenging as it was, 2020 also provided the right context for digital acceleration across most industries. Thus, a lot of companies increased the speed of their technology adoption, implementing new digital solutions to better work amid the new circumstances. While that process implied a complete revamp of most workflows, one of the main actors was the widespread adoption of cloud technologies.
In fact, cloud computing and cloud application development might be the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic. That’s illustrated by the fact that there was a 13% decline in on-premises workloads post-pandemic, all of which were moved to one of the main cloud computing options. That trend is far from being over, as recent surveys show that 56% of companies expect to move more than half their IT workloads to the cloud by this year’s end.
That’s the biggest explanation for experts across the board claiming that cloud computing will be among the most important trends of 2021. Naturally, that widespread cloud adoption will take many forms, with multi-cloud computing most likely being the most popular one. This approach, which uses multiple cloud computing services to support a particular company’s infrastructure, provides multiple benefits and offers the necessary flexibility for companies to quickly recover in the post-pandemic world.
There are several things to consider before using a multi-cloud approach for your business, though. Aside from considering multiple vendors, analyzing the possibility of cloud-based application development, and devising a sound implementation plan, there are some conceptual things you need to pay attention to. The most important one? The areas between those cloud services. Our experience at BairesDev has shown us that companies often take careful steps when hiring multiple cloud providers but forget to consider what goes between them. Here are our thoughts on that.
A World of Complexity
While operating in disparate cloud environments can increase your flexibility by providing availability, cost, and performance requirements of critical infrastructure (all while helping you avoid vendor lock-in), it also brings a massive challenge.
By working with different cloud environments you can easily fall prey to fragmentation and siloed workflows. In a highly-connected world where data must flow seamlessly between tools and platforms, neglecting that potential fragmentation can wreak havoc on how you do business and lead to unsustainable complexity.
Think about it. You might have one cloud provider that offers you a really great database platform while another provides you with the processing speed you need. How can you combine those advantages to get the ultimate cloud fit for your business? That’s precisely the guiding question here — how to combine multiple infrastructures with their pieces, their tools, and their databases.
A lot of people answer that question with technical details. And while it’s true that you will need a spotless tech integration to make it all work seamlessly, this goes beyond that. You have to worry about multi-cloud management that takes care not just about the technical aspects of such interconnected complexity but also about its constant evolution.
Taking Care of the Multi-cloud Approach
There are several aspects you need to take care of to ensure your multi-cloud infrastructure will work properly. I won’t get into specifics about vendors and their pros and cons. Enough to say that you have to do due diligence and research the different providers to find a combination that works for you. Here, we’ll take a look at making those different providers work together day in and day out.
What you need to do is implement management and monitoring layers. What you should be after first and foremost is controlling a heterogeneous cloud environment, which can look like a combination of security managers, governance tools, AIOps, and other technologies that allow you to closely monitor everything that happens to your multi-cloud infrastructure in real-time.
You need a single control dashboard that can gather all the information coming from the different vendors about the services you use from them. That’s not an easy thing to do, and you can certainly give it a try to develop your own solution (be it in-house or with the help of a cloud software development team). But you can always pick the route of AIOps tools, which uses AI-powered algorithms to manage a multi-cloud environment.
One of the best things about using those tools is that you can abstract and automate a lot of the process while making sure that the algorithms will get better the more you use them. Thus, you can rule out human governance and use an AI-based one. Doing that, however, can imply that you’re limited to the AI’s options and alternatives, which might not be mature yet for your multi-cloud configuration.
There’s an emerging trend that’s rising alongside multi-clouds and that’s cross-cloud solutions. That trend is nothing more than the software development solution to the multi-cloud management problem. By creating tools that take care of the interconnections and how you can handle them, cloud development companies are trying to accompany the rise of multi-cloud.
Of course, as it happens with any new kind of software, those cross-cloud solutions still need to reach their maturity to guarantee a superior experience that goes beyond the technical connection. But as more and more companies invest in multi-clouds, it feels like there’s no other choice but for those solutions to thrive through thick and thin.
As I said above, software in and by itself won’t be enough for you to take full control of your multi-cloud infrastructure. You’ll also need to plan your jump into the multi-cloud work, even investing in a validation phase that allows you to better understand how your diverse cloud providers work together and devise ways to better implement them in your workflow.
One essential point in this analysis phase is to take a deep dive into how those providers handle security and (especially) how they relate to one another in this regard. While the connection between providers might be there, you need to check its integrity and robustness. Trusting the de-facto security integration can lead to costly mistakes, especially because some of those integrations might be untested by the provider itself.
Finally, you need to adopt a continuous improvement strategy when working with multi-cloud approaches. That’s because you can’t expect a multi-cloud infrastructure to remain static. There’ll be changes, adjustments, and new integrations as you move forward, so your operations will be vigilant about them and evolve with them. That’s the only way to guarantee the efficiency and performance you are promised with this multi-cloud approach.
Beyond the Providers
Hiring the right cloud providers is just the beginning of your multi-cloud journey. You’ll need to worry about the space in-between them, the areas where those providers connect, and where you can fight the battle against the inherent complexities of this sort of approach. Naturally, doing that will require a lot of effort: in finding the right tools to secure management and monitoring, in developing a sound strategy to make all the pieces work, and even in adopting a new evolutionary mentality that follows a continuous improvement focus.
But all that effort will certainly pay off, as doing all of those things is the only way to leverage all the advantages of a multi-cloud environment while reducing its drawbacks to a minimum. That’s nothing to scoff at, especially during 2021, a year that promises to be the year of the multi-cloud.
