It used to be easy: pick your cloud, build out your IT footprint, and get back to business. But the explosion of cloud adoption has also led to an explosion of options for cloud providers, platforms, and deployment options. And that’s just when talking about infrastructure as a service!
Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
Use this research to understand the risks and benefits that come with a multicloud posture.
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Info-Tech’s Approach |
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It used to be easy: pick your cloud, build out your IT footprint, and get back to business. But the explosion of cloud adoption has also led to an explosion of options for cloud providers, platforms, and deployment. And that’s just when talking about infrastructure as a service! For many businesses, one of the key benefits of the cloud ecosystem is enabling choice for different users, groups, and projects in the organization. But this means embracing multiple cloud platforms. Is it worth it? |
The reality is that multicloud is inevitable for most organizations, and if it’s not yet a reality for your IT team, it soon will be. This brings new challenges:
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By defining your end goals, framing solutions based on the type of visibility and features your multicloud footprint needs to deliver, you can enable choice and improve performance, flexibility, and availability.
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Info-Tech Insight
Embracing multicloud in your organization is an opportunity to gain control while enabling choice. Although it increases complexity for both IT operations and governance, with the right tools and principles in place you can reduce the IT burden and increase business agility at the same time.
Multicloud isn’t good or bad; it’s inevitable |
The reality is multicloud is usually not a choice. For most organizations, the requirement to integrate with partners, subsidiaries, and parent organizations, as well as the need to access key applications in the software-as-a-service ecosystem, means that going multicloud is a matter of when, not if. The real question most businesses should ask is not whether to go multicloud, but rather how to land in multicloud with intent and use it to their best advantage. |
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Your workloads will guide the way |
One piece of good news is that multicloud doesn’t change the basic principles of a good cloud strategy. In fact, a well-laid-out multicloud approach can make it even easier to put the right workloads in the right place – and then even move them around as needed. This flexibility isn’t entirely free, though. It’s important to know how and when to apply this type of portability and balance its benefits against the cost and complexity that come with it. |
Don’t fall in reactively; land on your feet |
Despite the risks that come with the increased scale and complexity of multicloud, it is possible to maintain control, realize the benefits, and even use multicloud as a springboard for leveraging cloud benefits in your business. By adopting best practices and forethought in key areas of multicloud risk, you can hit the ground running. |
01 Hybrid Cloud
Private cloud and public cloud infrastructure managed as one entity
02 Multicloud
Includes multiple distinct public cloud services, or “footprints”
03 Hybrid IT
Putting the right workloads in the right places with an overall management framework
Info-Tech Insight
The SaaS ecosystem has led organizations to encourage business units to exercise the IT choices that are best for them.
Hybrid IT: Aggregate Management, Monitoring, Optimization, Continuous Improvement
The risks in multicloud are the same as in traditional cloud but amplified by the differences across footprints and providers in your ecosystem.
Info-Tech Insight
Don’t be afraid to ask for help! Each cloud platform you adopt in your multicloud posture requires training, knowledge, and execution. If you’re already leveraging an ecosystem of cloud providers, leverage the ecosystem of cloud enablers as needed to help you on your way.
Increasing flexibility & accelerating integration |
Because multicloud increases the number of platforms and environments available to us, we can Multicloud also can be a catalyst for integrating and stitching together resources and services that were previously isolated from each other. Because of the modular design and API architecture prevalent in cloud services, they can be easily consumed and integrated from your various footprints. |
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Modernizing data strategy |
While it may seem counterintuitive, a proactive multicloud approach will allow you to regain visibility and control of your entire data ecosystem. Defining your data architecture and policies with an eye to the inevitability of multicloud means you can go beyond just regaining control of data stranded in SaaS and other platforms; you can start to really understand the flows of data and how they affect your business processes for better or worse. |
Move to cloud-native IT & design |
Embracing multicloud is also a great opportunity to embrace the refactoring and digital transformation you’ve been blocked on. Instead of treading water with respect to keeping control of fragmented applications, services, and workloads, a proactive approach to multicloud allows you to embrace open standards built to deliver cloud-native power and portability and to build automations that increase reliability, performance, and cost effectiveness while reducing your total in-house work burden. |
Info-Tech Insight
Don’t bite off more than you can chew! Especially with IaaS and PaaS services, it’s important to ensure you have the skills and bandwidth to manage and deploy services effectively. It’s better to start with one IaaS platform, master it, and then expand.
The principles of cloud strategy don’t change with multicloud! | |
If anything, a multicloud approach increases your ability to put the right workloads in the right places, wherever that may be. | |
It can also (with some work and tooling) provide even broader options for portability and resilience. |
Put everything in its right place.
Just like with any cloud strategy, start with a workload-level approach and figure out the right migration path and landing point for your workload in cloud.
Understand the other right places!
Multicloud means for many workloads, especially IaaS- and PaaS-focused ones, you will have multiple footprints you can use for secondary locations as desired for portability, resilience, and high availability (with the right tooling and design).
Info-Tech Insight
Portability is always a matter of balancing increased flexibility, availability, and resilience against increased complexity, maintenance effort, and cost. Make sure to understand the requirement for your workloads and apply portability efforts where they make the most sense
Don’t manage multicloud with off-the-rack tools.
The default dashboards and management tools from most cloud vendors are a great starting point when managing a single cloud. Unfortunately, most of these tools do not extend well to other platforms, which can lead to multiple dashboards for multiple footprints.
These ultimately lead to an inability to view your multicloud portfolio in aggregate and fragmentation of metrics and management practices across your various platforms. In such a situation maintaining compliance and control of IT can become difficult, if not impossible!
Unified standards and tools that work across your entire cloud portfolio will help keep you on track, and the best way to realize these is by applying repeatable, open standards across your various environments and usually adopting new software and tools from the ecosystem of multicloud management software platforms available in the market.
Info-Tech Insight
Even in multicloud, don’t forget that the raw data available from the vendor’s default dashboards is a critical source of information for optimizing performance, efficiency, and costs.
The ecosystem is heterogeneous.
The explosion of cloud platforms and stacks means no single multicloud management tool can provide support for every stack in the private and public cloud ecosystem. This challenge becomes even greater when moving from IaaS/PaaS to addressing the near-infinite number of offerings available in the SaaS market.
When it comes to selecting the right multicloud management tool, it’s important to keep a few things in mind:
Key Features
Info-Tech Insight
SaaS always presents a unique challenge for gathering necessary cloud management data. It’s important to understand what data is and isn’t available and how it can be accessed and made available to your multicloud management tools.
As a working example, you can review these vendors on the following slides:
Info-Tech Insight
Creating vendor profiles will help quickly identify the management tools that meet your multicloud needs.
VMware CloudHealth
Vendor Summary
CloudHealth is a VMware management suite that provides visibility into VMware-based as well as public cloud platforms. CloudHealth focuses on providing visibility to costs and governance as well as applying automation and standardization of configuration and performance across cloud platforms.
Supported Platforms
Supports AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, VMware
Vendor Summary
ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) is a module for the ServiceNow platform that allows deep visibility and automated intervention/remediation for resources across multiple public and private cloud platforms. In addition to providing a platform for managing workload portability and costs across multiple cloud platforms, ServiceNow ITOM offers features focused on delivering “proactive digital operations with AIOps.”
URL: servicenow.com/products/it-operations-management.html
Supported Platforms
Supports CloudFormation, ARM, GDM, and Terraform templates. Also provisions virtualized VMware environments.
CloudCheckr
Vendor Summary
CloudCheckr is a SaaS platform that provides end-to-end cloud management to control cost, ensure security, optimize resources, and enable services. Primarily focused on enabling management of public cloud services, CloudCheckr’s broad platform support and APIs can be used to deliver unified visibility across many multicloud postures.
URL: cloudcheckr.com
Supported Platforms
Supports AWS, Azure, GCP, SAP Hana
Feature Sets
This activity involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step:
Info-Tech Insight
This checkpoint process creates transparency around agreement costs with the business and gives the business an opportunity to reevaluate its requirements for a potentially leaner agreement.
SaaS While every service model and deployment model has its place in multicloud, depending on the requirements of the workload and the business, most organizations end up in multicloud because of the wide ecosystem of options available at the SaaS level. Enabling the ability to adopt SaaS offerings into your multicloud footprint should be an area of focus for most IT organizations, as it’s the easiest way to deliver business impact (without taking on additional infrastructure work). |
IaaS and PaaS Although IaaS and PaaS also have their place in multicloud, the benefits are usually focused more on increased portability and availability rather than on enabling business-led IT. Additionally, multicloud at these levels can often be complex and/or costly to implement and maintain. Make sure you understand the cost-benefit for implementing multicloud at this level! |
With multiple SaaS workloads as well as IaaS and PaaS footprints, one of the biggest challenges to effective multicloud is understanding where any given data is, what needs access to it, and how to stitch it all together.
In short, you need a strategy to understand how to collect and consolidate data from your multiple footprints.
Relying solely on the built-in tools and dashboards provided by each provider inevitably leads to data fragmentation – disparate data sets that make it difficult to gain clear, unified visibility into your cloud’s data.
To address the challenge of fragmented data, many organizations will require a multicloud-capable management platform that can provide access and visibility to data from all sources in a unified way.
When it comes to multicloud, cloud-native design is both your enemy and your friend. On one hand, it provides the ability to fully leverage the power and flexibility of your chosen platform to run your workload in the most on-demand, performance-efficient, utility-optimized way possible.
But it’s important to remember that building cloud-native for one platform directly conflicts with that workload’s portability to other platforms! You need to understand the balance between portability and native effectiveness that works best for each of your workloads.
Info-Tech Insight
You can (sort of) have the best of both worlds! While the decision to focus on the cloud-native products, services, and functions from a given cloud platform must be weighed carefully, it’s still a good idea to leverage open standards and architectures for your workloads, as those won’t hamper your portability in the same way.
Even on singular platforms, cloud cost management is no easy task. In multicloud, this is amplified by the increased scale and scope of providers, products, rates, and units of measure.
There is no easy solution to this – ultimately the same accountabilities and tasks that apply to good cost management on one cloud also apply to multicloud, just at greater scale and impact.
Info-Tech Insight
Evolving your tooling applies to cost management too. While the vendor-provided tools and dashboards for cost control on any given cloud provider’s platform are a good start and a critical source for data, to get a proper holistic view you will usually require multicloud cost management software (and possibly some development work).
A key theme in cloud service pricing is “it’s free to come in, but it costs to leave.” This is a critical consideration when designing the inflows and outflows of data, interactions, transactions, and resources among workloads sitting on different platforms and different regions or footprints.
When defining your multicloud posture, think about what needs to flow between your various clouds and make sure to understand how these flows will affect costs, performance, and throughput of your workloads and the business processes they support.
Automation Is Your Friend Managing multicloud is a lot of work. It makes sense to eliminate the most burdensome and error-prone tasks. Automating these tasks also increases the ease and speed of workload portability in most cases. Automation and scheduling are also key enablers of standardization – which is critical to managing costs and other risks in multicloud. Create policies that manage and optimize costs, resource utilization, and asset configuration. Use these to reduce the management burden and risk profile. |
Evolve Your Tooling Effective multicloud management requires a clear picture of your entire cloud ecosystem across all footprints. This generally isn’t possible using the default tools for any given cloud vendor. Fortunately, there is a wide ecosystem of multicloud tools to help provide you with a unified view. The best cloud management tools will not only allow you to get a unified view of your IT operations regardless of where the resources lie but also help you to evaluate your multiple cloud environments in a unified way, providing a level playing field to compare and identify opportunities for improvement. |
Info-Tech Insight
Embrace openness! Leveraging open standards and technologies doesn’t just ease portability in multicloud; it also helps rationalize telemetry and metrics across platforms, making it easier to achieve a unified management view.
Multicloud security challenges remain focused around managing user and role complexity
Info-Tech Insight
Don’t reinvent the wheel! Where possible, leverage your existing identity and access management platforms and role-based access control (RBAC) discipline and extend them out to your cloud footprints.
Define Your Cloud Vision
This blueprint covers a workload-level approach to determining cloud migration paths
10 Secrets for Successful Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
This research set covers general cloud best practices for implement DR and resilience in the cloud.
“7 Best Practices for Multi-Cloud Management.” vmware.com, 29 April 2022. Web.
Brown, Chalmers. “Six Best Practices For Multi-Cloud Management.” Forbes, 22 Jan. 2019. Web.
Curless, Tim. “The Risks of Multi-Cloud Outweigh the Benefits.” AHEAD, n.d. Web.
Tucker, Ryan. “Multicloud Security: Challenges and Solutions.” Megaport, 29 Sept 2022. Web.
Velimirovic, Andreja. “How to Implement a Multi Cloud Strategy.” pheonixNAP, 23 June 2021. Web.
“What is a Multi-Cloud Strategy?” vmware.com, n.d. Web.