Overcome your challenges for hybrid-multi cloud success

In a post-COVID world, we are seeing a shift towards a mix of on-premises private cloud, multiple public clouds and legacy platforms to adapt to the new normal and meet business needs. However, close to 30% of organisations say that moving to a hybrid/multi cloud model is in itself a huge challenge². What are the hurdles that organisations must clear to succeed?

There are many reasons why an organisation would wish to implement hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure. Key reasons include the desire to avoid vendor lock-in, enable best-of-breed solutions, free up access to self-service resources to run dev/test workloads cost-effectively, and enhance business continuity in times of high demand or failure in a particular public cloud.

It’s true that organisations can reap greater efficiencies, economies of scale and resiliency with hybrid and multiple clouds. But there’s a catch: there must be mindful and careful planning of short- and long-term goals to fully realise these benefits.

When planning for the hybrid and multi-cloud, there are three challenges that IT leaders must consider and prepare for.

Operational complexity

IT teams operating in hybrid and multi cloud environments deal with a lot of complexity. Traditional governance models are ill-suited to managing the distributed and continuous nature of the new cloud environment.

Public clouds were not made to work cohesively together, so IT leaders need to ensure that the organisation has a handle on all apps and workloads across the infrastructure. Especially when many people across the organisation have the power to order cloud services, it’s all too easy for the technology estate to grow unchecked. This is where a single pane of glass or centralised point for multiple services comes in helpful to prevent cloud costs from spiraling out of control.

Data management complexity

When data sets are deployed across multiple providers, IT teams often run into trouble controlling, tracking and synchronising that data.

What organisations need is data strategy alignment across clouds, or risk creating data siloes and databases that don’t communicate. This has real business implications, as the ability to aggregate data sources impacts analytics and business intelligence.

Data protection is an adjacent issue. It is simply more difficult to protect data that you don’t know about or cannot see. Leaders need to rethink access control and data lifecycle management policies for a hybrid or multi cloud architecture. Where possible, certain security and governance processes should be proactive and automated.

Skills gap

Perhaps the greatest headache faced by cloud-ambitious organisations today is the lack of cloud skills. Cloud beginners particularly struggle the most with gaining the right cloud expertise³.

In The Dimension to Tackle for Successful Cloud Transformation, we touched on the role of the CIO in transforming organisational skills to match the requirements of modern cloud computing. IT directors and admins not only need high levels of cloud and IT proficiency but must also be well-versed in the business and economic implications of the cloud they help to manage every day.

Given the challenges, enterprises in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) are turning to managed cloud service providers to effectively manage and optimise their on- and off-premises cloud⁴.

Managed service providers like Singtel enhance organisations’ cloud efforts with broad and deep cloud expertise across major cloud providers. As a Well-Architected partner with both migration and DevOps competencies, we support:

· A planned and effective migration of infrastructure and applications

· A simplified and cohesive management strategy across multiple clouds

· Optimised experience at every stage of the software development cycle

With these competencies, we helped a leading retail group to develop and execute a robust cloud migration plan. The seamless migration resulted in scalable infrastructure that could handle the peaks of demand, data analytics enablement and cost optimisation. Similarly, with clear business goals guiding the cloud-first strategy, and with the right partner to fill in the gaps, any organisation can build the hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure that their business needs to flourish.

¹Flexera, Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, April, 2020

²IDC, IDC Expects 2021 to be the Year of Multi-Cloud as Global COVID-19 Pandemic Reaffirms Critical Need for Business Agility, March, 2020

³Flexera, Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, April, 2020

⁴IDC, IDC Predicts Hybrid and Multi Cloud to Dominate and Managed Cloud Adoption to Rise in Asia/Pacific by 2020, February, 2020