How to reduce complexity in a multi-cloud world

Organisations have gone from being wary of the cloud to working with multi-cloud environments in just a few short years. However, matching applications and workloads to the right cloud platform isn’t always straightforward, with considerations such as data privacy, security, flexibility and cost being different for diverse options. As these requirements can change rapidly, CEOs need simplified yet comprehensive visibility into their cloud environments.

Electing a multi-cloud IT delivery model adds complexity through multiple management tools, disaggregated billing, diverse security models and the need to run multiple skill sets in-house. Businesses need to manage multi-cloud environments through a single pane of glass to get maximum value from their different cloud platforms. Specifically, they need a solution that delivers flexibility and efficiency, governance, and cost optimisation features.

Flexibility and efficiency are crucial because the solution needs to simplify the complex task of managing applications and their supporting infrastructures. This simplification saves time, resources and costs, freeing up the IT team to focus on innovation elsewhere in the business.

The right solution will also enable rapid deployment of new applications, and should offer easy scaling, updating, and migrating of applications in response to business and customer needs. Importantly, this should happen in real-time, and be largely automated.

Governance is also crucial to help businesses control costs and capacity utilisation, along with application development conformity and automation policies. The proliferation of IT solutions via the cloud makes it easy for some deployments to be overlooked. These can quickly get out of hand, potentially creating security and operational risks for the organisation, so it’s essential to ensure all deployments are within policy and controllable.

To do this, the solution needs to deliver transparency across every environment and provider, without leaving anything in the shadows. This lets the IT team align technology with business objectives while simplifying vendor management.

Resilience is another important piece of the puzzle. The right solution will let businesses avoid vendor lock-in, instead making it simple to move applications and workloads from one environment to another based on application, compliance, cost requirements, and innovation advancements. This lets businesses optimise costs and free up funds for reinvestment according to business priorities, as opposed to tying up funds in capital expenditure just to keep the IT environment stable.

An ideal solution will also let the business capture costs and charge them back to the appropriate line of business, delivering a granular level of detail that contributes to responsible financial management.

A managed services approach to managing a multi-cloud environment delivers key services via a single portal, such as application lifecycle management, managed services anywhere, and cloud optimisation. This lets businesses develop, deploy and manage applications, virtual machines and other workloads on any infrastructure or cloud to meet business and technical needs.

Application lifecycle management lets businesses keep an eye on every application, as well as compute, network and security functions – including audit trail – across any infrastructure, virtually anywhere. It includes self-service components and infrastructure consistent with production environments. This functionality also automates deployments and upgrades with no downtime.

Managed services let organisations get on with running the business instead of overcommitting resources to keeping the IT environment up and running. Everything from design, build and run services to monitoring, remote administration, patching and back-up can be delivered via managed services that mask the complexity of multi-cloud environments, making them easier to manage.

Cloud optimisation is a key component of any multi-cloud management solution, since it lets businesses easily provision, migrate and scale hybrid cloud environments, and can include billing and support in a single, centralised platform.

The future of business lies in the cloud, and the businesses that can extract every last ounce of value from their cloud environments will be best placed to stay well ahead of their competitors. Implementing a multi-cloud environment and then managing it effectively is the most reliable and cost-effective way to do this.