A multi-cloud strategy can generate numerous benefits for organizations. But on the flip side, it can also create challenges around cloud management and governance.
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In the present-day business landscape, it’s rare to find organizations that don’t use the cloud. Cloud computing enables all kinds of companies to optimize operations, get more value out of IT investments, drive greater collaboration efficiency, and capture better insights from data. It also allows them to be more flexible and scalable, as well as more resilient to disruptive events like cyberattacks and data breaches.
Thousands of organizations are aware of all these benefits of the cloud, which explains why more than 85% of them are expected to embrace a “cloud-first” principle by 2025. The cloud’s popularity has grown to such an extent that an increasing number of organizations are employing a “multi-cloud” approach. In 2023, one recent survey reported that 87% of surveyed organizations had adopted such an approach — making it the “de facto” standard for modern cloud computing.
A multi-cloud strategy can generate numerous benefits for organizations. But on the flip side, it can also create challenges around cloud management and governance. Let’s explore these challenges and understand how a no-code multi-cloud management platform can help address them.
Benefits of multi-cloud environments
Gartner describes a multi-cloud strategy as “the deliberate use of cloud services from multiple public cloud providers”. Most multi-cloud environments include two or more public clouds, private clouds, or a combination of both public and private clouds.
With multi-cloud, organizations can access a broad range of best-of-breed cloud features and capabilities from multiple vendors, which make it easier to build and run many kinds of applications. They can also set up separate cloud environments for different workloads. The approach thus provides greater flexibility to choose the best environment and services for each workload and move applications to different cloud environments as required. In addition, multi-cloud removes the need to depend on a single cloud provider. In doing so, it minimizes the risk that a particular provider may not have the compute resources and cutting-edge services an organization needs to make the most of the cloud for their specific workloads and needs.
Multi-cloud solutions can be custom-tailored for each distinct workload. These customizable solutions enable businesses to modernize traditional applications, build cloud-native apps, and speed up software development by adopting DevOps practices and cloud-native technologies like containers and microservices. Furthermore, the freedom to work with multiple cloud vendors creates opportunities to optimize workloads based on their specific speed, performance, security, and compliance requirements. Furthermore, by using a multi-cloud management platform, organizations can manage their entire multi-cloud environment and reap more benefits from it.
Multi-cloud environments can be more cost-effective and reliable than single-cloud environments. Organizations can lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) by accessing the best prices from different providers. They can also directly control costs by scaling resources up or down as needed. And since they are not tied to a single cloud vendor, they can avoid many interoperability and cost issues that are common to single-cloud environments.
Multi-cloud provides both redundancy and reliability to reduce the impact of downtime or outages and to maintain high application availability. It also enables teams to back up all critical applications and data, allowing for reliable disaster recovery and uninterrupted business continuity, even after a disruptive event like a cyberattack.
As we have already seen, multi-cloud can be a game-changing approach for cloud-ready organizations. But In order to make the most of this approach, organizations must also be aware of its other side — its five common challenges:
Multi-cloud environments are much harder to manage and govern than single-cloud environments. This difficulty arises from increased architectural complexity. As more clouds, workloads, and technologies are added to the environment, its complexity increases, making it harder to manage and control. It’s also difficult to achieve reliable and consistent workload performance across complex environments and to ensure that performance matches business requirements.
Multi-cloud complexity can also increase if organizations follow a “cloud first” approach in which new workloads are deployed to a public cloud instead of to a private cloud. This approach often creates unnecessary redundancies and increases cross-environment communications, which not only makes the environment too complex, but also makes it harder to ensure consistent availability and performance across all clouds.
Cloud sprawl in multi-cloud environments also creates management and governance challenges. An ecosystem of multiple clouds with their own workloads, tools, and resources can quickly become too large and unwieldy to manage. Also, it’s very easy to spin up new cloud resources like virtual machines and containers. Organizations often forget that such resources exist in their environment, increasing its size and making it difficult to manage and govern.
Resource sprawl and underutilization also increase cloud costs. If resource provisioning and usage are not controlled, the sprawl can get worse, further increasing TCO and minimizing the cost benefits of multi-cloud environments.
Security is another crucial challenge with multi-cloud. All major cloud providers implement security controls into their cloud offerings. However, these controls are not adequate to keep threats out. One reason is that a multi-cloud ecosystem presents a broader attack surface for cyberattackers. These adversaries can leverage numerous attack vectors to attack a multi-cloud environment, including account hijacking, side-channel attacks, cookie poisoning, malware injections, and DoS attacks. They can also take advantage of security misconfigurations and insecure APIs to gain unauthorized access to sensitive resources, disrupt services, and to steal business-critical data. To avoid and mitigate such attacks, it’s vital to consistently apply security policies across all the clouds and workloads in the multi-cloud environment. But given its complexity, this can be difficult to do, increasing the security risks and the probability of attack.
The good news is that organizations can mitigate all these multi-cloud challenges. The key is to leverage a business-ready multi-cloud management platform like the emma platform.
Previously we explored how a complex multi-cloud environment — despite its many advantages — also creates several roadblocks for organizations. These roadblocks can be eliminated through cloud management platforms, designed to simplify the monitoring, management, and governance of multi-cloud environments.
Most cloud providers provide management tools. However, these tools are mostly limited to their own clouds. They do not provide holistic visibility into the entire multi-cloud environment, so enterprise teams cannot observe what’s going on in the environment — much less take appropriate action to address issues related to complexity, sprawl, performance, costs, or security. The emma platform: Truly simple multi-cloud governance and management.
In multi-cloud environments, both management and governance are crucial. Multi-cloud management, which is the responsibility of IT and operations teams, is about streamlining the technical and operational aspects of resource provisioning, deployment, monitoring, maintenance, and optimization across multiple clouds. Management activities are ongoing and continuous, and their goal is to ensure efficient and cost-effective resource use and to boost multi-cloud scalability and performance.
Multi-cloud governance on the other hand is about establishing policies, controls, and other measures to maintain security, control costs, and ensure compliance with regulations and standards. IT, compliance, and security teams are all involved in multi-cloud governance, and they work together to create policies, manage compliance, and mitigate risk before resources are deployed to multiple clouds.
Theemma multi-cloud management platform enables organizations to unlock all the benefits of multi-cloud, while minimizing the usual complexities of multi-cloud management and governancet. Here’s how they can benefit from the cloud-agnostic and no-code approach of the emma platform:
The emma platform i provides a unified view of the entire multi-cloud infrastructure and its performance. Thanks to this single source of truth, businesses can benefit from a plethora of cloud-native technologies and services from multiple clouds. They can also monitor and manage all the cloud resources, applications, and services across different cloud providers without writing a single line of code.
The platform enables governance teams to effortlessly and consistently implement policies in multi-cloud environments, and deploy strong measures for data governance and cost control. And they can do all of this in just a few minutes and without having to do any coding, which means that even non-technical personnel can undertake multi-cloud governance activities.
Regardless of data volumes, workload types, or scalability goals, businesses can leverage the platform’s automation capabilities to configure and manage their multi-cloud infrastructure, automate routine tasks, control costs, and optimize cloud resources without coding or programming.
By automating many cloud management and governance tasks that previously required coding, the emma platform enables organizations to reduce their dependence on external resources with specialized technical knowledge or programming expertise. It thus helps them cut costs and increase their cloud ROI. It also frees up teams to focus on more important tasks, increase their productivity and efficiency, and add more value to the organization.
The platform offers a range of security tools and features for stronger access control, data encryption, and even threat detection and response that effectively and automatically protect multi-cloud resources from cyber threats. Moreover, the emma platform deploys and maintains cloud services and applications in a consistent, transparent manner, ensuring complete compliance with local regulations and company policies.