Multi Cloud Approach: 3 Challenges To Be Aware Of

What is a Multi Cloud Approach?

Multi-Cloud is an approach that leaves many IT leaders scratching their heads in confusion for a number of reasons. Whether the reason is lack of insight into how to leverage multi-cloud or understanding the value of this approach, we know that Multi-Cloud is here to stay. According to Gartner, multi-cloud strategies will jump from 10% in 2015 to more than 70% by 2018.

Once an IT leader buys into the idea that utilizing a multi-cloud approach is in the best interest of their organization, a new stage of confusion tends to emerge.  Often they don’t know how to navigate a multi-cloud strategy and how to properly architect and manage multiple cloud vendors in an organized fashion. The goal isn’t to spread data and applications all over the internet!

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Three challenges organizations face with Multi-Cloud Storage

1. Finance Challenges: 

   • Optimizing the cost of storage
   • Hidden (or not so hidden) egress charges
   • The development cost of re-platforming apps to move to the cloud

2. Integration Challenges

   • Lack of experience/process for integrating multiple clouds
   • Making it work with existing data
   • Making Data Fabric “real” in the public cloud
   • Leveraging existing investments (a la Snapmirror, RecoverPoint)

3. Technical Operations Challenges

   • Multi-Cloud is hard, and often organizations don’t have the expertise on-hand
   • Managing the complexity utilizing diverse functionality from multiple clouds
   • Huge complexity integrating clouds (especially multiple clouds)
   • Big Data requirements can be tricky to handle

Getting all of the major providers, like AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle and IBM to work together so organizations can form a seamless multi-cloud is highly unlikely, so what’s the solution?

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How to Tackle a Multi-Cloud Approach

In tackling a multi-cloud approach, organizations need to start with assessing their existing approach and defining a new strategy that encompasses how they manage the things that are and will always be important, such as compliance, risk, and cost control, and still have a sense of control over the management of their environment.

To address these operational challenges of a multi-cloud reality, IT teams will need the ability to visualize resources and manage performance across all environments. Only then will you enable your organization’s infrastructure to be used as a competitive advantage rather than as a risk.

Best practices to take into consideration before implementing a multi-cloud strategy:

• Proactively monitor cloud and infrastructure applications
• Align IT resources with business demands
• Identify infrastructure needs to improve application performance
• Look into both on-premise and public cloud costs to make informed decisions
• Research hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure and services you may not be familiar with
• Prioritize automation to make migration less painful
• Identify regulatory compliance issues before migrating

All of this is much easier said than done, so if you’re struggling to implement or manage a multi-cloud environment, we recommend leveraging a third-party to assist with the evaluation, architecting, planning, and execution of cloud migrations, and possibly even managing the new environments. Through overcoming these challenges, you can ensure a successful implementation and know that your organization is on track for leveraging the benefits of multi-cloud.

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