In multi-cloud environments, organisations must balance the agility of a start-up while meeting the security and compliance needs of a major enterprise. For a smooth road to cloud transformation, here are four areas that organisations must take care of.
Enable agility with visibility
When operating in a multi-cloud environment, a top concern for many customers is the lack of visibility across clouds. Many deployments fail to reach their potential because IT administrators are unaware of what cloud resources are available, where workloads are, and how they are performing. This is especially true in large organisations spanning regions, using multiple cloud providers each with multiple accounts.
The solution here is to replace the patchwork of cloud monitoring tools with a single, unified view of the cloud organisation. With that established, IT teams are better equipped to spot performance and security issues, and respond with the agility needed in today’s world.
Design applications to live on any cloud
Especially in a multi-cloud world, applications need to be designed to live in any cloud. As business requirements change and technology advances, organisations must be able to shift applications rapidly to where they are most needed. Having to re-jig applications invites disruption and harms the agility of the business.
Sophisticated cloud optimisation tools will help enterprises to ensure that applications are portable across clouds, whether they are comprised of VMs, containers or both. This will go a long way towards boosting agility and future proofing the business.
Automate and orchestrate
The hybrid-multi cloud infrastructure and applications are only going to grow. Organisations need to manage that growth in size and complexity by automating manual and repetitive tasks. This shrinks the resource and time overhead, and allows IT teams to focus on priorities and red flags.
More importantly, automation and orchestration help to ensure that processes are consistent and repeatable across clouds. This delivers the control needed for security, governance and compliance, and is key to an agile multi-cloud environment.
Controlling costs by controlling consumption
It’s a common misconception that the cloud always offers the cheaper route. However, cloud buying is not a one-time, closely-controlled activity done every few years. It is instead a continuous engagement that, combined with a lack of overall visibility and control, can be a recipe for creeping costs.
Keeping track of thousands of individual line items in the cloud bill is a serious challenge for CIOs and IT leaders. For Singtel customers and many organisations out there, a good cloud optimisation tool helps to keep tabs on what is being bought, by whom, and helps to figure out what and how to buy from providers amidst the growing range and complexity of offerings available today.
