If your strategy requires multi-cloud, you need a strategy for multi-cloud management. If you ended up with multi-cloud without a strategy, you need a strategy for multi-cloud management even more.

Reasons for Using a Multi-Cloud Environment

Multi-cloud means using multiple cloud providers. Businesses have different reasons for choosing that architecture:

• Best in class. Different cloud providers may have different strengths. Multi-cloud can leverage the best in class technologies from whichever vendor provides them.
• Disaster recovery. Deploying the same workload in multiple clouds offers resiliency and load balancing.
• Reduce vendor lock-in. If your workload can run in multiple clouds, you aren’t tied to a vendor who may become too expensive or problematic to work with in the future.

Or you may have ended up with multi-cloud accidentally rather than by choice. When decisions about which cloud to use are made at the department level rather than for the entire business, different business units may weigh factors differently and choose different clouds. Multi-cloud may also be the result of unauthorized decisions and shadow IT, with individual employees selecting cloud services outside of any IT oversight.

Multi-cloud Management Challenges

Whatever the reason for your multi-cloud environment, it adds complexity to cloud management. The issues include:

• provisioning
• orchestration
• end user support
• inventory management
• vendor management
• monitoring, performance, and lack of visibility
• analytics and lack of integrated data
• capacity/utilization and optimization
• cloud cost management
• backup and disaster recovery
• user identity management
• security, data governance, and compliance

How do you overcome these multi-cloud challenges? Making sure your team has the right skills is a top priority. Consider bringing in outside experts to fill in the gaps where your internal IT team falls short.

To help you manage your resources, look for tools from third parties. A cloud vendor’s tools only have insight into that cloud vendor’s environment. A third party tool can consolidate data from multiple clouds and provide a unified view that offers better insight into your status and needs.

Be prepared to adjust as the offerings of your multiple cloud vendors change. While multi-cloud is often a solution to vendor lock-in, you shouldn’t feel locked in to any of your multiple environments. A periodic review of your architecture to make sure it still meets your needs is important, particularly given the expense and complexity of these environments.

Prescient Solutions offers IT consulting and managed technology services to  help you address your cloud needs, no matter how many clouds you use. Contact us to learn more about taking control of your cloud environment.