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Tag: multi-cloud adoption

  • How To Build Out a Successful Multi-Cloud Strategy

    How To Build Out a Successful Multi-Cloud Strategy

    Navigating even just a single cloud environment can be complicated enough for any startup. Between understanding the range of features on offer, planning for expenditure and ensuring you have the right expertise to leverage the tool to its full potential, the thought of managing multiple clouds can seem daunting.

    However, whether your company is just starting out or has been around for years, the rewards to be reaped from a multi-cloud approach make it a worthy investment. Adopting a multi-cloud strategy offers a whole host of benefits and can allow you to optimize costs when implemented correctly. In fact, a recent Gartner survey of public cloud users found that 81% of respondents are working with two or more providers. In addition, the amount of business applications, services and workloads is set to double over the next two years.

    Here’s what companies of all sizes can gain from going multi-cloud, and how they can do so.

    Why Opt for Multicloud?

    For startups, adopting a multi-cloud strategy can be rewarding from day one. If you’re building your proof-of-concept or are in the design stage of building your infrastructure, leveraging multiple environments at once can help you develop faster and with more advanced tools.

    With access to multiple clouds, you can play around with the strengths of each provider and combine them to get the “best of all worlds,” increasing agility and eliminating vendor lock-in. Having immediate access to more than one cloud also means being able to take advantage of these features as and when you need them, without having to fully migrate to another cloud, which can be a costly and lengthy process. In fact, Gartner analyst Michael Warrilow stated that “most organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy out of a desire to avoid vendor lock-in or to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions.”

    Opting for a multi-cloud environment also boosts security and disaster recovery and ensures easier migration for some data and applications. Cybersecurity is heightened as spreading applications across different providers means an attack is less likely to bring your entire infrastructure down at once. Furthermore, sticking with one provider inevitably runs the risk of losing control of a mission-critical application during an outage. All of this adds to the overall resiliency of your system’s infrastructure.

    So, how exactly can you get started with your multi-cloud journey?

    Making the Right Cloud Choices

    While a multi-cloud approach can deliver serious value in terms of resiliency, flexibility and cost savings, making sure you’re choosing the right providers requires a comprehensive assessment.

    Luckily, all main cloud vendors offer free trial services so you can establish which ones best fit your needs and see how they work with each other. It will pay to conduct proofs-of-concept using the free trials and run your data and code on each provider. You also need to make sure that you’re able to move your data and code around easily during the trials.

    It’s also important to remember that each cloud provider has different strengths—one company’s best option is not necessarily the best choice for you. For example, if your startup is heavily reliant on running artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications, you might opt for Google Cloud’s AI open source platform.

    Or perhaps you require an international network of data centers, minimal latency and data privacy compliance for certain geographies for your globally used app. Here’s where AWS could step in. On the other hand, you might need your cloud applications to seamlessly integrate with the various Microsoft tools that you already use. This would make the case for Microsoft Azure.

    There are multiple factors at play that you have to carefully consider to ensure ROI of your multi-cloud investment. According to a 2019 Spiceworks study, AWS comes out top for maximum uptime, Azure wins on compatibility and Google Cloud proves to be the best for manageability.

    However, it’s also crucial to remember that there are far more cloud providers than the “big three.” For example, Aliyun is Chinese conglomerate Alibaba’s cloud computing offering, while Oracle and IBM also have their own services. Many startups turn to more niche vendors that can better suit their individual needs, so it could pay to explore alternative options, too.

    Ultimately, you need to understand not only what your current needs are but also how your business goals align with the capabilities of your cloud strategy. Consider what you might need in the future that your current cloud provider doesn’t provide.

    Avoiding vendor lock-in—being able to dip into different features as and when you please—is one of the key benefits of multi-cloud adoption. However, it requires careful planning and assessment of your short- and long-term business goals and how these relate to your cloud infrastructure needs.

    Managing Multiple Cloud Environments Requires Expertise

    There’s no doubt that leveraging a single cloud environment requires team members with experience and know-how of that particular cloud vendor. So, moving to a multi-cloud approach means there’s an even higher demand with regards to the expertise you need at your disposal.

    If your team only has engineers who are experienced with working with Azure, it wouldn’t be a wise move to immediately adopt AWS without recruiting more talent. This is especially true as AWS is the most complex and mature of all of the main cloud providers and requires the relevant knowledge to be able to take full advantage of the tools and applications available. Hence, you need to consult your team at every step of the way on what kind of cloud environment is within their capabilities when crafting your multi-cloud strategy.

    Another vital aspect of multi-cloud adoption is managing the integration of the databases from each cloud provider. This means aligning your data management strategy across each cloud environment, otherwise you risk creating data silos and databases that don’t communicate with each other. Fortunately, many cloud providers include features that let you create clusters and manage and deploy databases. A team that understands the need for this is essential.

    Finally, a DevOps culture is crucial for any successful multicloud strategy. The purpose of multicloud adoption is not only to build out your infrastructure, but also to power continuous delivery and integration when it comes to product development. To ensure you select the best features and determine the right capacity according to your needs and expertise, you need to get the input of your entire DevOps team, including cloud experts, software developers and QA engineers, too. In fact, going one step further, many companies are even building out Cloud Centers of Excellence (CCoE), aa team of cloud experts who drive cloud-based digital transformation across an organization.

    The Balance of Controlling Multi-Cloud Costs

    Controlling and managing your expenditure while adopting a multi-cloud environment is no easy task, especially as your personalized use of the tool, which scales up and down, will result in fluctuating costs. In fact, controlling these expenses can be so difficult that cloud cost management vendor ParkMyCloud predicted that companies spent more than $14 billion on unnecessary cloud infrastructure costs in 2019.

    From a cost-saving perspective, Google Cloud is the best option as it offers more flexible contracts, lower starting costs and clearer visibility into expenditures compared to the other big providers. However, the decision should be taken against the potential ROI of the multicloud strategy you adopt, so calculating the financial optimization that will come from accessing multiple cloud environments can help guide you.

    If possible, it’s a good idea to consult with an expert partner on the ways in which you can best manage costs and maximize ROI. If this isn’t an option, you can use different tools that allow you to create estimates around expenditures.

    As the growing numbers around multi-cloud adoption suggest, it’s a trend that’s delivering value and is here to stay. With a multi-cloud environment, startups and enterprises alike can have flexibility around the features they need, optimize costs, increase security and protect themselves against outages. However, embarking on a multi-cloud strategy is no straightforward task: It requires research, planning and consultation with your technical team. By aligning your business goals with your cloud requirements and democratizing your decision process, you can ensure you get the most out of your multi-cloud investment.

  • What It Takes to Succeed in a Multi-Cloud Environment 

    What It Takes to Succeed in a Multi-Cloud Environment 

    A multi-cloud strategy offers the best possible scenario for ensuring business continuity and helping improve innovation

    Business problems are not “one size fits all,” and neither are cloud architectures. Organizations are looking for specific solutions that deliver on their bespoke needs—a driver for many of them shifting from one cloud provider to working with multiple providers. In fact, 84% of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy. This offers them additional resilience and security when it comes to ensuring business continuity and protecting their business and customer data.

    Having a multi-cloud strategy could mean many things. It could mean using different cloud data warehouse (CDW) providers such as Amazon Redshift and Snowflake. It might mean hosting operational data stores in AWS, but transferring and performing analytics on that data in Azure. Or, the underlying cloud platforms could differ, such as two different Snowflake instances—one on Google Cloud Platform and a second on Microsoft Azure. These different CDWs could be hosted in different parts of the world. Sometimes, having a multi-cloud strategy means all of these at once.

    Common Mistakes

    Organizations often lock themselves in (often inadvertently) to a single cloud vendor by choosing tools or technologies that are very difficult to make portable. It can be very tempting to go for the most simple, seamlessly integrated piece of technology that a cloud vendor has to offer, but if that limits your choice of vendor later and does not interoperate with other clouds, it can lead to regret.

    While there is an uptick of adoption for multi-cloud strategies, it is still in the early days—especially for many organizations that are still coming to grips with moving on-premises workloads to the cloud. Expect a lot more in this area as more customers demand that clouds work better together and resist services that lock them in.

    Another mistake organizations make is that they do not account for the complex challenges that come with more data and differing technologies. Integration between data sources and solutions will be tough since not all providers offer seamless connections with other tools. That is why it is so important that organizations use technology that is cloud-agnostic, saves on costs and seamlessly provides better transition between clouds.

    Enterprises need to have the right technical expertise, technologies and tools in place or they run the risk of failure. As businesses increasingly move to a multi-cloud strategy, the specialized skills they need to turn data into value are changing at staggering speed. Managed tools that leverage the power of the cloud enable us to handle more varieties of data, in larger amounts, at greater speed and scale than ever before. But the platform and the tools aren’t the only things that have changed—the techniques and resources on data teams are also shifting.

    A data team focused on hand-coding and retrofitting technologies for cloud migration is not necessarily one that is prepared for modernizing data architecture and implementing a multi-cloud strategy. The data team needs to include people with the ability to organize data for cost-effective analysis and reporting that leads to intelligent conclusions—that is, data engineers with cloud training and experience as well as the ability to understand the data itself.

    How to Gain Control Over a Multi-Cloud Channel

    Organizations adopt multi-cloud strategies for a multitude of reasons. They may be sensitive to cost, have preferred partners, have adopted different grassroots technology in different departments and so on. However, sometimes the strategy is about the capabilities that are available. Cloud computing is an innovative space. While core cloud platforms for the major clouds such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are very similar in functionality for their core services such as storage, compute and databases, when it comes to the more advanced services such as machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics, there are real advantages to being able to work across multiple clouds. For example, you might find that the data warehouse platform that best suits your needs is on AWS but the best ML tool for processing that data and inferring meaning is on Google Cloud Platform.

    To have a successful multi-cloud strategy, companies need to use cloud-agnostic tools and technology that works with more than one cloud data warehouse and are able to support all the different environments with as little friction as possible.

    Enterprises will need to embrace the best of what cloud technology vendors have to offer as opposed to watering down their offerings for a lowest-common-denominator, works-everywhere-but-limits-functionality-approach.

    With a multi-cloud approach, all the advantages of cloud remain but you avoid many of the pitfalls. You still have the cloud scaling and cloud pricing to keep costs down. However, there is danger in being limited to a single cloud vendor and their ecosystem. Particularly for companies that want to lead by innovation, especially innovation with data, where the accelerating pace of technical improvement continues across all the major cloud vendors. Maintaining the flexibility to work on the best cloud platform to solve a particular business problem or process will give them the competitive edge.

    Working With Multi-Cloud Environments

    Here are some tips for making multi-cloud environments more manageable:

    • In general, work with existing, open, and emerging standards wherever possible.

    • Use containers for compute—ideally on Docker or Kubernetes.

    • Cloud storage such as Amazon s3 or Azure Blob Store are usually quite simple and migration is manageable. However, stick to common open data standards such as AVRO, Parquet or even CSV.

    • Security is a place where cloud vendors would love to lock you into their technology and can be painful to move. Use a third-party security provider such as Auth0 or PingIdentity.

    • For more cloud-agnostic and future-proof configuration management, consider Terraform over Cloudformation and other templating systems.

    • Writing serverless functions can be a huge advantage in terms of simplifying management; however, it’s also a place where a cloud vendor can heavily lock you in. Think carefully and keep your logic in a widely supported language such as Python or Node (Javascript).

    • When running images avoid cloud vendor operating systems over popular third parties such as CentOS or Ubuntu.

    • Whenever you engineer software that interacts with cloud APIs, design the layers of abstraction from the start and think about how you could migrate to another cloud. Once an application has been written to operate in two clouds, adding support for the third and fourth becomes incrementally easier.

    • Choose tools that are built specifically for and also enhance the major cloud platform to ensure you have the right strategies aligned to the right platform. As mentioned above, different cloud providers do certain things better. Make sure to understand what tools work best in which cloud environment—or better yet, find solutions that are purpose-built for cloud data warehouses to maximize your ROI.

    • Implement tooling to track usage across clouds for budgeting and resource allocations and latency to identify architectural pain points that may need remediation.

    •  Evaluate independent software vendors’ offerings that extend the capabilities and scope of what is available in a native cloud service provider offering.

    • Select a solution that extends the cloud object store to multiple clouds, as a default multi-cloud deployment tier, to allow for the greatest degree of flexibility.

    While a multi-cloud strategy may seem overwhelming and difficult to manage at first, it ultimately offers the best possible scenario for ensuring business continuity. Having the right tools in place will ensure manageability while empowering you to lead in innovation, ensuring the best possible return for your investment.

  • Multi-Cloud Adoption: Time to Rethink Your Identity and Access Management

    Multi-Cloud Adoption: Time to Rethink Your Identity and Access Management

    This may well be the decade that the data center’s reign falls, and multi-clouds prevail. A multi-cloud strategy, which incorporates cloud services from multiple vendors, promises plenty of benefits, including improved resilience and flexibility that makes it easier for enterprises to meet various application and data needs. But, there will also be operational challenges. Expect security, specifically identity and access management (IAM), to be one of them. 

    Gartner states that “by 2025, 80% of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data center, versus 10% today.” Except for a few mission-critical processes that will remain on-premises because they require intense oversight and control, much of an enterprise’s workloads and data will be spread across a multi-cloud environment, with users accessing applications from a range of devices from multiple locations–making it more difficult to secure, control, track and manage access to applications and services. Without a comprehensive IAM plan, an organization could be more vulnerable to attacks and data breaches.

    Instituting the right IAM strategy now, in concert with an evolving multi-cloud architecture, will help protect threats and ensure that the right users have access to the right information when they need it. To get started, we recommend following these key recommendations. 

    Get Your ID Store in Order

    IAM solutions are designed to make sure only people appropriately identified and cleared can access an enterprise’s systems and services. In today’s increasingly complex IT environment, an IAM solution must include an ID store that supports both on-premise systems and cloud services. Unfortunately, too many companies still rely on Microsoft Active Directory as the single source of truth for the IT services they provide. This needs to change.

    As companies begin to adopt multi-cloud architectures, they’ll soon discover that Active Directories are not flexible enough to support IAM, nor can they keep up with the growing number of potential threats. Integrating an identity software product that can manage users’ digital identities, credentials and groupings with Active Directory may work as temporary solution, but as user passwords and access rights are dispersed across on-premise and cloud-based systems, things can get complicated quickly, taxing even the well-resourced IT team.

    If you haven’t already done so, it may be time to extend Active Directory (AD) to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft’s multi-tenant cloud-based directory and identity management service that enables Single Sign-On (SSO) access to on-premise and cloud applications, putting users through an authentication process to prove they are who they say they are. It uses multi-factor authentication, a two-step identity verification system that requires two or more of the following methods: something you know (password), something you have (trusted device) or something you are (biometric screening).

    Embrace Zero Trust

    The premise of zero trust has been around for several years. According to CSO, the first model was defined by John Kindervag (then principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc.) in 2010. The idea is that when it comes to securing enterprise systems and data, no user–internal or external–can be trusted. Security threats are much more sophisticated today and are impacting organizations at greater rates than ever before.

    Malware such as phishing, email phishing and drive-by downloads–which can occur when visiting a website, viewing an e-mail message or by clicking on a deceptive pop-up window–put an organization’s identity and authentication at increased risk. Once an attacker gets a working identity and authentication method, he or she can do almost anything, including system damage, data leaks and destruction, and more. A zero trust network that rethinks approaches to resource access is quickly becoming a necessity.

    Part of the move to zero trust should include a decision to move away from passwords, which are still widely used. Passwords are typically too weak or often re-used, making them vulnerable and difficult to manage. As such, they don’t deliver robust enough security for sensitive systems and confidential information. A passwordless approach eliminates this problem by removing the need for users to remember passwords and for organizations to store them. There are several ways to go passwordless, including adopting biometric authentication such as touch ID and face recognition, and token-based methods such as mobile app authenticators or secured USB keys.

    Control Your Multi-Cloud Strategy

    Of course, distributing an enterprise’s workloads and data across larger numbers of clouds operated by different providers and located in various geographic regions can increase the complexity of IAM. IT staff will have to learn how to manage, provision, control, track and synchronize the systems in each environment, and such a highly distributed operation can easily become an operational challenge. Things can get even more messy, and risky, if an enterprise’s multi-cloud adoption develops in an ad-hoc manner.

    Multi-cloud best practices include working with existing cloud partners, adopting orchestration tools, controlling the risks of shadow IT and keeping the number of cloud environments to a minimum by adding only those clouds that support and elevate an enterprise’s business goals.

    With multi-cloud adoption on the rise, IAM is becoming increasingly important in order to protect against insider and outsider cyber threats and to ensure that the only the appropriate users can access the resources they need, when they need them. 2020 is the year to get identity and authentication right. It’s time to develop a comprehensive IAM strategy that includes an advanced ID store, zero trust and controlled multi-cloud adoption.

    — Richard Diver

  • Multi-Cloud Adoption to Better Enable the Developer Workforce

    Multi-Cloud Adoption to Better Enable the Developer Workforce

    Over the past decade, we started to see a broader shift toward the use of multiple cloud providers by the enterprise. The need to reduce risk, optimize cloud usage, manage costs and the push to open source and cloud vendor-agnostic technologies are providing more options for developers, which will likely lead to an even steeper increase in multi-cloud usage.

    In 2019, we saw the acquisition of Red Hat by IBM, the largest software company acquisition in IT history, to support both cloud and open source software. This acquisition, and others such as Salesforce/Tableau and Google/Looker, suggest that the trend will continue moving forward. In addition to support from mergers and acquisitions, multi-cloud within companies and use by developers will continue to rise.

    Multi-Cloud to Better Enable the Developer Workforce to Keep Up with Competition

    Multi-cloud architecture allows companies to distribute, move and optimize workloads across multiple cloud environments, decreasing the risks and costs associated with running workloads on only a single cloud environment and allowing one to select the best mix of capabilities for the desired use cases. These benefits make the single cloud option far less popular, and results in more interest in multi-cloud deployments.

    This choice is important–to keep up with the competition, digital businesses across the globe need to make better decisions and deliver faster, smarter actions. They must capture and integrate data in real time from wherever it is located, govern these data assets and augment the intelligence of their business through deep analytical insights. These actions must support both the technical and business levels of the enterprise, and developers must be armed with the right tools to enable these capabilities. A multi-cloud strategy ensures that this is possible, and offers the greatest degree of flexibility and choice when it comes to building solutions.

    To further support this shift, it is important to provide developers with the flexibility to choose best-of-breed solutions in order to streamline their processes. Limiting developers to one cloud vendor can restrict them from using the best tool for the job and result in suboptimal cloud deployments. But with a multi-cloud approach, developers can create their own individualized arsenal. Executives, who expect the best from their developers, have to pursue a multi-cloud strategy in order to get the most reliable and fastest results for their business. 

    Industry Insights for Mature DevOps Teams 

    Last year, IBM released research that showed that 85% of the companies surveyed were already multi-cloud adopters. Approximately 39% of those companies have implemented DevOps processes, and 41% have a multi-cloud management strategy. Clearly, multi-cloud is important to the strategy of an organization. 

    As pointed out, in order to be successful with a multi-cloud strategy, one of the key issues for developers to tackle is the creation of strong, automated DevOps processes. These processes must bring structure to a multi-cloud computing ecosystem. According to 2019 research from GitLab, overall DevOps adoption is on the rise, and teams that have successfully implemented a mature DevOps program are seeing major improvements in their workflow. In addition to speed, mature DevOps teams are almost 1.5 times more likely to feel innovative and are three times more likely to discover security vulnerabilities earlier in the pipeline.

    Future of Multi-Cloud Adoption and Impact

    Moving forward, we will see more companies adopt multi-cloud strategies and developers will be among the groups that are most impacted by this approach. For developers, multi-cloud adoption involves matching the business case for certain problem sets to the appropriate cloud providers so the expected ROI can be achieved with the right technology blend. 

    Developers need the right tools to develop, test, support, manage and monitor the deployed solutions consistently across cloud providers. Over time, it may also be necessary to move the solutions from one vendor to another as the requirements, business landscape and cost justifications change. Thus, developers must work within the organization to evaluate and choose the relevant features from each vendor, augment as necessary with external tools and regularly monitor industry trends and capabilities to transition if needed. This is the flexibility that a multi-cloud approach brings, but it must be balanced with the strategy, business and financial needs of the organization.

    The cloud will continue to be a strong technology focus area for enterprises and developers across the globe. Cloud adoption strategies will continue to broaden and shift toward multi-cloud as needed, allowing developers to streamline their processes, select the best tool for the job and create more value for their company as a whole.

    — Nelson Petracek