84 percent of companies use a multi-cloud strategy today, according to Rightscale’s 2019 State of the Cloud. It’s easy to see why CIOs are going all in – their IT teams can enjoy scalable workloads, say goodbye to vendor lock-in, reduce the risk of service interruptions and choose the right cloud for specific workload requirements.
However, companies use almost 5 public and private clouds on average, bringing about the need to efficiently manage these cloud environments.
Here are some key areas of consideration when planning for a successful multi-cloud strategy.
Application deployment
One obvious challenge that multi-cloud introduces to the equation is application delivery complexity. To save yourself from a headache, avoid cases that require reconfiguration or cloud-specific adaptation of your applications. If moving an application between clouds requires significant work each time, or results in the application running differently across clouds, you may not achieve the multi-cloud efficiency that you were looking for in the first place.
Compliance
In order to keep your business running, you need to maintain cloud compliance. Do HIPAA, PCI DSS, FISMA and SOX sound familiar? Take the time to ensure that your cloud providers can meet compliance requirements before including them in your architecture. Additionally, do your due diligence on compliance requirements like the GDPR. Be aware of new industry laws and mandates that govern your data and make sure that your vendors can stay compliant.
When planning your cloud architecture, consider taking a security-first approach. Ensure that you clearly define your security requirements in regards to data and data access, and then implement and test your cloud security architecture.
Vendor management
The benefits of multi-cloud are hard to ignore, but overseeing multiple providers can be taxing. Instead of hoping that your cloud tools will work together, be proactive. Determine how you will work with multiple cloud partners and do thorough research to ensure that the cloud platforms and tools are compatible. Keep in mind that applications tend to be more complex when they are designed to work across multiple cloud providers, which can lead to an increase in errors and other issues.
Performance monitoring
No matter how many clouds you’re using, it’s critical to make performance monitoring a part of your strategy from the very beginning. Maintain a data-driven approach from planning to operations and deployment. We also recommend using a multi-cloud monitoring tool to gain real-time visibility into your application delivery and network performance.
Go SD-WAN
Zenlayer helps businesses take cloud strategy and adoption to the next level with software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solutions. Using SD-WAN, you can implement business policies, prioritize mission-critical applications and more.
To learn how SD-WAN improves multi-cloud access, please visit our Product page.
