Enterprises that have successfully adopted multi-cloud ecosystems are making the most of it. However, a few are still struggling with the best cloud management practices.
Businesses globally are evolving exponentially because of the surge in adopting the cloud and other technologies in their enterprise tech stack. The adoption of cloud across industries, including healthcare, retail, finance, and many more, has made the competition fierce. According to a recent report by Virtana titled “The State of Multi-Cloud Management 2022,” nearly 82% of survey respondents currently utilize a multi-cloud strategy.
The report also highlights that 78% of the respondents have work processes deployed on more than three public clouds. IT decision-makers must implement the best cloud management strategies to manage their business network without compromising security.
Also Read: Why Cloud Migrations Fail: How to Avoid the Common Pitfalls
Managing multi-cloud ecosystems enable organizations to manage workflow and other applications on various cloud platforms. One of the significant reasons to have an efficient multi-cloud management system is to get more visibility throughout all the cloud services partners.
Moreover, an efficient cloud management strategy must update all the applications, devices, and tools in that cloud environment and secure the stored data. Organizations with the best cloud strategies will have effective workflow automation, enabling all the providers with analytics to enhance the functionalities offered.
Following are a few strategies that decision-makers can consider to improve the management of multi-cloud ecosystems:
Adopting a multi-cloud environment increases the complexities of the organization. Before enterprises embark on a journey to adopt more than one cloud provider, they need to understand better the vendor they are planning to partner with.
While exploring, evaluating, and selecting different cloud providers, it is essential to stay vigilant while making the right purchase decisions. Business owners can design and enforce a cloud adoption framework to remain alert during purchasing.
Moreover, it is crucial to identify and deploy applications that help businesses to manage their daily operations related to the public cloud. Decision makers should consider training the entire workforce on the cloud adoption framework and the cloud computing architecture to streamline the adoption process.
Migrating to multiple cloud environments will expose the organization to various new risks than the current ones. Hence, IT decision-makers must be vigilant about the unknown risks and new threats the business will face. Enterprises need to implement the right tools to mitigate the new risk exposed by multi-cloud environments.
Decision-makers should consider Organizational infrastructure as the source code and implement change procedures based on them. These change procedures should be able to identify differences in cloud service providers’ implementations.
One of the most sensitive assets of any enterprise is the data stored and processed by them. While designing a multi-cloud management strategy, it is essential to determine how the data will be extracted from one provider and migrated to another.
While defining a multi-cloud management strategy, Data privacy and security must be a top priority that decision-makers must consider. Maintaining business network security will be challenging as organizations embrace the latest technologies and tools.
IT teams must design and enforce centralized data governance and access policies across the organization to reduce the risks in managing multi-cloud ecosystems. Business leaders can consider partnering with the best-managed security service providers (MSSPs) to centralize their security environment.
It is challenging for businesses to ensure seamless integration on legacy systems. The complexity of integrating multiple cloud providers increases. Providing seamless integration between the legacy system and data on third-party cloud applications without compromising security adds complexity.
Comparatively, integrating applications in the same cloud environment is less challenging. Customized application programming interface (API) and integration tools enable organizations to gather data from various cloud ecosystems and on-premises environments.
Irrespective of what strategies are implemented, disasters or technical glitches are bound to happen. All organizations, regardless of their size, type, or industry, must have a holistic disaster recovery plan to stay prepared during uncertain times. Many enterprises keep their data backed up on a cloud server as a defense strategy. A few business owners store their data backup on two or more cloud servers to avoid losing even if one service is disrupted.
Initial migration of systems and data to multi-cloud ecosystems will always be a complex and vulnerable task for any enterprise. Business decision-makers need to implement a strategic plan to ensure a seamless migration and reduce disruptions resulting from an Unpredicted downtime.
Enterprises that want to embrace multiple cloud providers to accomplish their business operations should execute network migration tests to evaluate their preparedness.
One effective way to reduce the efforts and time required is to embrace business process automation. Decision-makers need to consider automation testing a top priority to enhance the migration process with workflow automation.
Also Read: Economic Benefits and Challenges of Cloud Computing
As business process automation, integrating new tools and multiple cloud environments will generate tremendous data related to performance, accessibility, downtime, traffic patterns, resource utilization trends, and correlations between them. Modern CIOs need to explore opportunities with more capabilities than traditional network monitoring to gather valuable insights from generated data and utilize these insights to improve performance.
Most public cloud providers have inbuilt data analytics and a dashboard that offers visibility into the network. But while managing a multi-cloud environment, businesses should have a centralized view of the entire IT resources irrespective of the cloud server at rest.
To get a unified view of all the IT resources on multiple cloud platforms, businesses can use APIs to connect various data sources to create a holistic dashboard view. The best cloud computing platform offers inbuilt capabilities to have a centralized view.
Multi-cloud management can be a tedious task for organizations, and managing it is essential to ensure streamlined business operations without compromising security. CIOs can consider the abovementioned strategies to have streamlined multi-cloud ecosystems that help accomplish business goals.
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Nikhil Sonawane is a Tech Journalist with OnDot Media. He has 4+ years of technical expertise in drafting content strategies for Blockchain, Supply Chain Management, Digital Transformation, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, SaaS, PaaS, cloud computing, Data analytics, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, and other emerging enterprise technologies and trends.With eclectic experience in working and writing about complex enterprise systems, he has an impressive track record of success. Through his specialized knowledge of thoughtful and compelling writing styles, he covers a wide range of topics that delve into organizational effectiveness, successful change, and innovation management.His Commitment to ongoing learning and improvement helps him to deliver thought-provoking insights and analysis on complex technologies and tools that are revolutionizing modern enterprises.He brings his eye for editorial detail and keen sense of language skills to every article he writes. If traveling was free, it would have been difficult to trace him.
