Blue skies ahead: 3 tips for managing multi-cloud

Multi-cloud’s moment

The “multi-cloud strategy” has become something of a buzzword in the IT sector. While the concept behind multi-cloud is as simple as “more than one”, developing and maintaining a multi-cloud strategy isn’t as straight forward. That said, an increasing number of organisations are making the move to multi-cloud, seeking greater flexibility and control over workloads and data. According to Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud Report, 89% of respondents said they already have a multi-cloud strategy. 

It’s important to point out that while there’s a strong trend towards adopting a multi-cloud strategy, it’s not necessarily the best fit for everyone. If you’re happy with your current cloud setup, stick with it – adding more clouds does add complexity. Yet, for some organisations this increased complexity is outweighed by ROI. Successful multi-cloud strategies enable businesses to take advantage of best-in-class features of multiple providers, meet certain laws and regulations and keep up with the rapid pace of modern business.  

 Whether your organisation has embarked on a multi-cloud journey or is considering one, here are three important tips for managing a multi-cloud environment.  

1. Focus on transferrable skills

All successful multi-cloud strategies require a team with the right skills and expertise to support the solutions in place, for as long as they’re in use. Additional cloud environments mean an organisation’s cloud posture becomes more complex. Therefore, it’s vital that in-house engineers and decision makers have the ability to comprehend their complete cloud footprint and understand their organisation’s technology landscape.

Our Solutions Architect Manager, Lucas Smith, explains that while all the clouds are different, they share many of the same fundamentals.

2. Create consistency

Despite having access to an abundance of tools designed to simplify the management of cloud environments, Cisco’s 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report found that 33% of responding organisations saw operational complexity as a significant concern when adopting hybrid or multi-cloud models. While it’s possible to individually manage each cloud environment, most organisations lack both the time and resources.

Further, multiple cloud providers add an additional layer of complexity to managing your multi-cloud environment. . Additionally, no two cloud vendors are the same – each has varying tools and APIs for managing their cloud services.

“An integral part of any multi-cloud strategy is the ability to track, manage and secure workloads consistently across all environments from a single interface,” explains Lucas, “Organisations should ensure they’re building multi-cloud management capabilities directly into the products and solutions of their provider to enable unified operations.”

3. Monitor costs 

Again, no one cloud provider is the same – which means there are different costs and pricing structures for every environment. Hidden costs are a reoccurring theme when it comes to managing multi-cloud. It’s important to ensure you understand exactly how much you’re spending for each workload. Implementing a cost management solution will help you track individual workloads and initiatives. Without this visibility of costs and ROI, organisations will find themselves struggling to accurately budget and prioritise business initiatives, leading to unnecessary costs.  

Lucas reminds organisations to remember what the project aims to achieve, as the ‘why’ should define the success measures required to guide and evaluate progress, “Cloud is all about value creation, everything you do should be net value positive, rather than net value negative. It’s easy to look at things in a silo and think this is good, but it’s important to have the right strategy in place to see the big picture – multi-cloud might mean multiple clouds, but they should all form part of the same strategy – the ‘why’.” he explains.  

You don’t have to go it alone 

Accredited multi-cloud experts are readily available, no matter where you are on your multi-cloud journey. Take the stress out of managing your multi-cloud environments and gain access to our army of cloud experts today.