There are two possible outcomes of going with a multicloud approach: either multicloud helps you address your concerns about cloud, or multicloud multiplies the challenges you have with cloud. Which result you get depends on how carefully you leverage multicloud to address your cloud concerns.
1. Vendor lock-in.
Using multicloud to avoid vendor lock-in can create several new challenges. First, it increases the number of vendors you need to track and manage. Second, it makes it harder for your team to develop expertise in your technology stack, as you’ve multiplied the technology involved. Third, you may be unable to take advantage of each cloud vendor’s unique offerings in order to keep workloads portable across clouds.
2. Cloud costs.
It can be challenging to control costs in an individual cloud. Choosing the right size and tier of servers and storage is difficult and made more complex with multiple environments that don’t offer the same capabilities or describe them differently. In addition, multiple clouds mean more products to track and more potential self-service leading to unneeded but costly usage. Each cloud vendor may bill on a separate cycle and break line-items down differently, making it harder to understand overall usage and spending across all clouds. Tools that provide a consolidated view of cloud usage across all environments are vital to control costs when using multicloud.
3. Using technology effectively.
With multicloud, you’ve got two choices about how to use technology. You can try to use technology that’s compatible across all your clouds, or you can leverage the special features and advantages of each cloud. In addition, you need to decide how to allocate your workloads across your clouds.
4. Achieving reliability.
Multiple clouds mean multiple potential points of failure, but also potentially enable a highly available architecture. Backup and recovery plans need to understand how to achieve consistent state across multiple platforms.
5. Keeping systems safe.
Security is always a challenge; it’s not uncommon for cloud resources to be left public when they should be made private. Multiple clouds make implementing consistent security policies harder and mean assumptions about default settings may not be valid in all environments. In addition, multiple clouds can make it harder to ensure data residency requirements are satisfied.
6. Simplifying data center management.
One goal companies often have for cloud is to reduce the effort their operations teams need to put into managing resources. Multiple cloud providers isn’t just a vendor management challenge; it’s a systems management challenge as well. Monitoring overall system status and reacting to problems is harder when each cloud provider uses a different interface to present status, shows a different detail, and offers different levels of access to underlying resources.
Address your multicloud goals with a specific strategy and with multicloud support from VAST IT Services. Download our guide to multicloud to learn more about making sure your multicloud implementation delivers the multicloud results you need.
