According to the Flexera State of the Cloud 2022 report, 89% of mid-size and large organisations across the globe have adopted a multi-cloud strategy. The trend is expected to continue as organisations realise significant benefits such as better disaster recovery, security, and freedom from vendor lock-in.
Each cloud provider, however, offers different tools for managing their cloud service, their own APIs, and different service-level agreements (SLAs). The disparate cloud environments must also be connected and secured. Furthermore, not all IT Teams are familiar/experienced with more than one type of public cloud. All the above lead to our next big question- are organisations ready to operate in a complex multi-cloud environment?
As ‘Managing Cloud Spend’ continues to be amongst the top 3 Cloud transformation challenges, adoption of a multi-cloud strategy calls for the need of multi-cloud management platforms/tools. Cloud management enables organisations to manage hybrid/multi-cloud services and resources through governance, life cycle management, brokering and automation. A centralised management platform further enables IT Teams to monitor workloads across multiple cloud providers over a single pane of glass.
Below are the three key benefits of adopting a multi-cloud management platform-
- Security: The complexity of a multi-cloud architecture can lead to increased opportunities for attack. Furthermore, different cloud providers have different security policies, and it can be challenging to track them in a multi-cloud environment. Cloud management platform offer features such a as monitoring, alerting, provisioning, and the ability to enforce security policies across multiple clouds, which significantly reduces the risk to threats.
- Cost management: Lack of management policies in a multi-cloud environment can easily lead to cloud sprawls. Multi-cloud management helps organisations keep track of costs/usage and further use intelligent data analysis to optimise cost management.
- Increased availability: Effective multi-cloud management enables IT teams to timely respond to failovers by duplicating and seamlessly migrating workloads to another cloud environment.
According to Gartner, the cloud management tooling market is approximately $1.5 billion, with an estimated 20% CAGR through 2025. As the market continues to evolve, the extensive options make decision-making more complex for Tech leaders managing workloads across multi-cloud environments. It is therefore key to first identify functional requirements and gauge what applies to your respective environment. Below are the most common use cases for Cloud Management Tools-
- Resource Management- Multi-Cloud Management platforms help to classify and maintain inventory, optimise resources, and trigger alerts. The platform aggregates data from APIs of individual cloud providers and builds a centralized view of cloud resources. This allows administrators to watch inventory, detect untagged resources, configure policies, and monitor changes. In case of live site issues, outages, component failures, or other changes - alerts are issued to notify critical condition and potentially attempt to take corrective action.
- Cost Management and Workload Optimisation – Often, large organisations need to cross-charge to different departments and therefore require a central IT Team and a platform to provide access to cloud resources for additional services. Additionally, while operating in a multi-cloud environment, there could be a need of networking services /components/resources that are not procured from Cloud providers. To recognise the costs of these cloud resources, the platform acts as a centralised cost management and tracking tool. The tool is further able to support large amount of (billing) data and allow Role based access control (RBAC) to access this sensitive data.
- Provisioning and Orchestration - If applications are distributed across multiple public clouds and there is a need to scale the environment up or down, the capability allows administrators to configure, orchestrate and automatically provision/deprovision depending on requirements and user demand. Organisations can leverage the platform for features like an end-user provisioning portal, provisioning templates, automated provisioning and workflows.
- Governance- Cloud Management platform must allow for features such as Role Based Access Control, Single sign-on, Identity access Management, security notifications, security configuration management and network policies to ensure compliance with best practices of cloud activity.
Summary
To overcome the issues of having to manage complex systems spanning multiple providers, organisations need to consider a Multi-Cloud Management platform that is capable of being deployed across both on-premises and any public cloud service. The goal is to completely abstract the underlying infrastructure and provide a consistent interface that spans compute, network, storage, and data management. However, organisations must understand their respective key use-cases before settling on the best Cloud Management Platform/tool. The selected tool must be capable of performing lifecycle management and discovery across all platforms.
For more information on Multi-Cloud Management, please get in touch.
