Strategic and Management issues Related to Multi-Cloud Environments

As a number of enterprises have been living in the cloud environments for a few years, many have transitioned to use multiple cloud services concurrently. For example, your organization may have deployed certain application workloads on a Microsoft Azure environment while another workload may be running on OpenStack. Similarly, another business unit of your organization may be using IaaS services from Amazon AWS. The reasons that an enterprise ends up in multiple cloud environments vary. Some of them are listed below:

1. An enterprise may use IaaS services from one cloud vendor while SaaS services from another vendor.
2. Multiple LOBs may use different cloud service providers independently for their own business needs.
3. One workload may be deployed across multiple cloud service providers – also called an active-active configuration.
4. One workload may be deployed on on cloud service provider with a backup on the other cloud service provider (active-passive).

Enterprises may use multiple clouds for different reasons. Different Lines of Business (LOBs) or business units contract their own cloud services for their specific business needs. Alternately, an enterprise may strategically opt to use multiple cloud services for redundancy purposes to reduce its risk. For example, a cloud service provider either may go out of business or may experience technical malfunctions in the use of its cloud environment. For example, both Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure platform have experienced downtime in the past due to hardware failure.

Managing the Security, Governance, and Systems Management Issues

Managing a multi-cloud environment can potentially cause security, governance, and overall systems management complexity that an enterprise must manage. As the whole idea of moving to a cloud is to reduce systems management complexity, it’s important that you as a CIO or senior manager do not introduce more complexity to your organization when ending up with a multiple cloud environment.

The following lists some of the tips for managing a multi-cloud environment for an enterprise.

1. Ensure you have a complete view of the network and application architecture as it relates to the cloud services. This architectural view should provide you a complete view of the application workloads that are in use, how they are distributed across the various CSPs, users utilizing those workloads, internal employees using various infrastructure services of the cloud, and so on.
2. Use the complete view of the network to assess any security and compliance issues that the overall cloud services can cause.
3. As moving to a cloud is meant to reduce cost and complexity, work with your CSPs to automate any tasks that can be done easily to minimize errors and increase efficiency.
4. Attempt to standardize the governance of the overall cloud architecture run by different vendors by having uniform policies and standards.
5. Recently, a number of multi-cloud management systems have surfaced to unify management of clouds from different vendors. However, as these tools are still in their infancy, they only support the big cloud platforms and may not be able to work across all the clouds that your organizations manages. However, as new products and features are being updated constantly, it’s best to check the current tools in the market and their relevance to your cloud environments.
6. Securing a cloud environment involves securing applications, databases, infrastructure, network access, and strong staff access policies. In a multi-cloud environment, these issues can get multiplied. Ensure that you do a multiple level detailed assessment and comprehensive security planning. It’s important to remember that while you may be outsourcing the operations to an external partner, as a CIO or senior IT executive you are still responsible for the operations, security, and privacy of your processes and data toward your stakeholders.
7. Depending on the complexity of your cloud environments, you may consider establishing a governance office with defined management and governance functions. This will help you create uniform standards by which to govern methodically across the various cloud service providers. The internal governance function will also serve as the main point of contact for your internal management and users of your organization whose services and applications are running on those cloud environments.
8. Ensure that you have the right staff with the right skillset to manage the multi-cloud environment. A common perception that enteprise managers develop early on is that they are outsourcing most functions to an external provider that they may not have a need for internal technical and other skilled resources. This is obviously untrue and it’s important to consider this facet as you transition to a multi-cloud environment that potentially could be based on multiple technologies and vendor platforms.
9. Enterprises should be wary of integration issues in multi-cloud environments. This is because each cloud vendor operates on its technology stacks and methodologies and standards don’t yet exist to provide application and platform portability across varied cloud environments.
10. When selecting multi-cloud management tools (e.g. RightScale Cloud Management), ensure that it provides the features that are designed to alleviate business’s issues and problems specific to your business and enterprise. When evaluated appropriately and selected, multi-cloud management tools can provide visibility across public and private clouds, bare metal servers, and other servers. The management software provides a governance layer that can help enterprises self manage clouds from an integrated console and can make use of analytics to give them deeper insights into the multi-cloud operations bringing efficiencies to the process.

 

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