You were promised agility and savings. Here is how to make it happen
There’s a 93% chance that if your enterprise uses public cloud, you’ve built a multi-cloud environment. The odds are also quite high that your environment was built somewhat haphazardly.
It was hard to avoid. 2020 was a year of experimentation and improvisation for IT teams as they scrambled to spin up remote work environments. Meanwhile, engineering teams used containers to innovate, marketing teams chose their own cloud apps, sales stayed connected with customers through the apps they chose, and supply chain built out new digital infrastructures. You may have also greatly expanded your multi-cloud reality through mergers and acquisitions. While deal-making dropped 21% for the first half of 2020 (on a year-to-year basis), it spiked in the second half of the year, as more than $1T in mergers and acquisitions were completed in the third quarter alone.
This rush to the cloud in 2020 — experts say it was 6.5 years of digital transformation in nine months — has brought an end to the concept of a single public could deployment for almost any enterprise. From a productivity, agility and innovation perspective, the potential of a multi-cloud environment (one that includes public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and edge computing) is game-changing. It’s truly transformational — if you manage it well.
For almost every organization, that’s a big if. The reality is that most enterprises face serious challenges that, if not proactively managed, can greatly diminish the benefits of a multi-cloud infrastructure. It’s important for everyone driving a multi-cloud strategy — including CTOs, CIOs, CISOs, and departmental leaders making cloud app choices — to identify the causes and symptoms of common implementation failures and continuously work to keep the organization on a path to cloud success.
When developing an effective multi-cloud management plan, one of the first steps is to understand not only the complexity of the infrastructure, but also the reasons for its evolution. By its nature, cloud is built for speed and, specifically, the agile development process. Cloud expands and accelerates the agile concepts of “sprints” and “pods.” The leaders of those workgroups and innovation initiatives are generally looking for best-of-breed solutions when they select a public cloud platform or app. They’re rarely thinking about aligning with platform consistency or trying to achieve management simplicity. This is the origin of most multi-cloud infrastructures and it gives rise to a sprawling collection of computing platforms, databases, data storage systems, access control systems, digital security tools, and governance systems. The number of tools and systems that require oversight can be overwhelming and can potentially put the IT teams in charge of managing it in a highly complex position. It can also lead to serious cost overruns for senior leaders who had expected that the cloud would have reduced their computing costs.
One way to address this cost and complexity issue is to insist that your various teams and departments consolidate on a single public cloud offering, thereby reducing the number of tools and systems across your infrastructure. This sounds great from a central management point of view. There would be fewer contracts to manage, fewer heterogeneous databases, and you could most likely manage user privileges with a single identity and access management (IAM) system. As appealing as that all sounds, it’s highly unlikely — and probably an innovation-killer. Asking your engineering, sales, marketing, and supply chain teams to not choose best-of-breed cloud technologies is untenable.
As an alternate strategy, you can give your various department teams the freedom to choose the cloud apps and platforms that work best for them and commit to a diverse multi-cloud strategy (do you really have a choice anyway?). Then, manage this diverse digital ecosystem by creating an abstraction layer or agnostic platform control solution that sits atop of your infrastructure and eliminates the need to interact with all the native system interfaces. Constructed properly, this allows your IT team to consolidate key activities such as provisioning users, tracking service level agreements (SLAs), and managing cloud contracts. You also won’t be forcing groups to give up the apps they like. Of course, establishing the abstraction layer will require you to acquire yet another piece of software, but it will likely resolve management complexity issues and keep you on a profitable and productive digital path.
Sriramkumar Kumaresan, head of service lines markets at Mindtree, advocates for dynamic business process level agreements (BPLA) that can keep pace with the speed of change in business and technology. He was quoted in a January 2021 CIO magazine article titled: 15 SLA Mistakes IT Leaders Still Make: “Dynamic and comprehensive BPLAs enable enterprises to map IT to business outcomes thereby evolving from an intuition to an intelligence led operating model.”
Deploying an effective abstraction layer will also give you the ability to centrally monitor productivity and utilization for each cloud app. One of the reasons so many multi-cloud strategies are considered failures is that they simply cost too much — and many cost overruns are a direct result of apps or storage space that you are paying for, but not fully utilizing. On a single pane of glass, you should be able to monitor usage of all the apps and storage space you’re buying. Also, if you deploy it properly, you can integrate older on-prem apps and storage and achieve a 360-degree view of your infrastructure.
Security is another area where you want to take a seamless, all-in-one approach to your multi-cloud infrastructure. The reality of a multi-cloud infrastructure is that it will increase your attack surface and provide hackers with interesting new places to penetrate your enterprise. Leveraging discrete security systems — or relying solely on built-in security capabilities of cloud providers — will likely leave you vulnerable to potential breaches. Whether you buy a security tool or choose a security-as-a-service solution, you can apply the same principles of the previously mentioned abstraction layer and create a unified approach to enterprise security.
For both the abstraction layer controls and the infrastructure-wide security strategy, you’ll need to deploy a data platform that supports your multi-cloud reality. The right platform will offer some key attributes and features, such as the ability to view an increasingly complex infrastructure from a single dashboard, rather than jumping from one native vendor-specific system to another. This consolidated view can include both your multi-cloud ecosystem and your existing on-prem systems. The right platform will also allow you to manage and monitor your full tech stack. The most effective platform will include predictive and prescriptive analytics to help identify places where you are overspending and places where you can cut costs.
These are just a few of the things you can do to bring your current multi-cloud environment under control and begin to capitalize on the full benefits of a successful digital transformation. Gaining visibility and control will put you on a path to achieve some key cloud objectives, including:
Innovation and speed to market: Give your engineers and DevOps teams the right environment and the right tools so they can create new offerings and accelerate new releases.
Unlock the full value of your data: Centralizing your data lets you understand it from a holistic perspective and leverage it to innovate, better serve customers, and improve business processes.
Uptime and resilience: A proper deployment of an abstraction layer and a data platform with analytics capabilities will allow you to be proactive — so you can identify problems before they cause downtime.
Comprehensive data security: Getting this right makes it easier to manage compliance, ensure privacy, and mitigate risk across the entire environment.
Cost control: Eliminate underutilization, track billing, manage contracts, and achieve the cost-cutting promise of cloud.
Cloud is clearly emerging as the central foundation of a scalable, resilient, and sustainable enterprise and a source of future competitive advantage. If your enterprise hasn’t completed a substantial amount of its digital transformation, it’s difficult to master the capabilities modern business requires. It also makes it nearly impossible to compete on the basis of flexibility, agility, or innovation. Organizations not fully engaged in the planning and deployment of a multi-cloud strategy are likely risking their growth potential — or even their very survival.
