A recent trend has emerged in our technology landscape, with organisations seeking to leverage the merits of multiple cloud providers. This has led to the surge in popularity of multi-cloud. However, as cloud adoption is getting widespread embracement, corporations need to evaluate their cloud strategies.
To get the most out of cloud computing and all its potential benefits, you must use the right tools and best practices. The right multi-cloud orchestration solution would help you achieve your cloud goals. Also, it would improve your operational efficiency and drive business success.
This post discusses the challenges of multi-cloud, how to overcome them, and the benefits of using the right multi-cloud orchestration solutions.
Challenges of Multi-Cloud
While multi-cloud adoption comes with many benefits, it also presents several challenges that you, as an organisation, must address. Below are some of the common challenges and how you can address them.
1. Security and Compliance
In choosing a multi-cloud company, the most important consideration is security. Individually, cloud platforms get treated organisationally as a hidden silo. This is most noticeable when you operate within the same virtual network. When we start mixing and matching them the wrong way, we start to notice some cracks in those walls.
As organisations adopt multiple cloud providers, they must ensure that their security strategy remains consistent across all providers. This also applies to compliance controls. They must be met across all jurisdictions.
Imagine you are considering starting a healthcare provider startup. Your company will manage electronic health records and process insurance claims. By virtue of the sensitivity of clinical records, you must ensure that patient data is secure. Therefore, whatever platform you use must also comply with regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The risk of manually staying up to date with this compliance across all the platforms could lead to exposure.
To address these challenges, you must implement a unified security strategy. This will allow you to identify and access management, encryption, threat detection, and response. Also, you must ensure that compliance controls are met across all cloud providers. You can achieve this by using compliance automation tools and continuous compliance monitoring.
2. Data Governance
Also, managing data across multiple cloud providers can be a significant challenge. Data consistency, security, and portability must be addressed to ensure data remains accurate, secure, accessible, and scalable.
Let us consider a hypothetical case of a global retailer that uses multiple cloud providers to store customer data, manage inventory, and process transactions. The onus is on the retailer to ensure the integrity of customer data and also its reliability. Only accurate real-time values should reflect in each transaction.
They can circumvent this by adopting a comprehensive data governance strategy. This includes using a unified data model, data quality, and security controls. They must also ensure that data remains portable across cloud providers, which can be achieved using industry-standard data formats and open-source data integration tools.
3. Interoperability and Integration
Manually integrating multiple cloud services and applications can pose a challenge. Each cloud provider may use different APIs, protocols, and data formats. Additionally, the complexity of the integration will increase with the number of cloud providers adopted by the organisation.
Consider a financial institution that uses multiple cloud providers to manage data, process transactions, and run analytics. The Fintech company will be forced to use different APIs and protocols for each cloud provider. This could quickly turn into a headache, which can lead to integration challenges and increased complexity.
This is why we advocate that organisations must adopt a common framework for deploying and managing cloud services. They could also use open-source integration tools and data integration platforms that can support multiple cloud providers and data formats.
4. Cost Management
There is a running joke amongst cloud users. We all fear waking up to a bill on an EC2 we forgot to close. Such is the cost associated with using the cloud and how one needs to be wary of it. Managing the cost of multi-cloud adoption is challenging. The providers charge different service rates and sometimes have varying pricing models. Additionally, the cost of multi-cloud adoption is likely to increase with the number of cloud providers the organisation uses.
A startup software development company could use multiple cloud providers to accomplish different tasks. This could range from hosting development environments, managing source code, and running automated testing, to deployment. The cost of using each cloud provider may vary, and the overall cost of using multiple providers may be difficult to track.
Such a company should be advised to implement a centralised cost management solution. This can optimise cloud spending across all cloud providers. They must also use cost management tools that can provide real-time cost visibility and forecasting and that can identify cost-saving opportunities such as reserved instances and spot instances.
5. Complexity and Management
As mentioned, with integration, it is challenging to manage a multi-cloud environment. It can be complex, as each cloud provider will have its own management tools, APIs, and interfaces. Additionally, the complexity of the management will increase with the number of cloud providers used by the organisation.
Take the case of an e-commerce company that uses:
- AWS for its data warehousing, we all love s3 buckets as a lake.
- GCP for its machine learning
- Azure for its website hosting.
Each cloud provider has its management tools, graphic interfaces, and APIs that the company must learn and use, which can lead to a high level of complexity.
He could easily adopt a unified management platform that simplifies the management and monitoring of multi-cloud environments. These platforms provide a single pane of glass view of all the cloud services and resources, regardless of the provider. They then enable you to manage, monitor, and automate their multi-cloud environment from a single location.
If you are considering a multi-cloud strategy or facing challenges with your existing multi-cloud environment, visit our website at ori.co to learn more about our multi-cloud orchestration solution and how it can help your organisation.
Benefits of Multi-Cloud
However, it's not all gloomy. With the right multi-cloud orchestration, multi-cloud has many advantages. These include:
- Cost savings: Using multiple cloud providers, you can compare the prices of each application or workload, and take advantage of the competitive cloud marketplace. This can lead to significant cost savings in the long term.
- Resilience: You can increase your system's resilience by spreading workloads across multiple cloud providers. If one provider experiences an outage, your system will still be available on the others.
- Flexibility: By using multiple cloud providers, you have the flexibility to choose the best services from each provider. You can cherry-pick the best each of them offers and use that to create a tailored solution for your specific needs. This could be because of performance or proximity to users - a key factor in driving customer experience.
To Wrap Up
Multi-cloud adoption is becoming increasingly popular as organisations seek to maximise flexibility, resilience, and cost savings. However, it comes with several challenges. Orchestration tools offer a solution to address these challenges by providing a common framework for deploying and managing cloud services across multiple providers.
At Ori, we offer a comprehensive multi-cloud orchestration platform. We simplify the deployment, management, and monitoring of cloud agnostic services across multiple providers. Our platform offers features such as resource provisioning, monitoring, cost management, security, and compliance controls. Get a demo today to learn how our platform can help you maximise the benefits of multi-cloud adoption while minimising the challenges.
