The Multi-Cloud Promise: Making A Mixed It Environment Play Well Together
Amit is part of the One Asia Japan Delivery Unit and leads Fujitsu's India Artificial Intelligence (AI) technical unit. Formerly, he worked at the Center of Emerging Technologies (CET), Fujitsu Consulting India and was one of the key figures in forming the first AI team for the Global Delivery Center (GDC). He is one of 32 Global Fujitsu Distinguished Engineers (GFDE), the only one from the 8 GDCs across domains, and out of five in AI. Amit has the unique ability to connect with people and be sensitive to their needs. He can relate and understand what is needed and guide people in the right direction.
Businesses are not obligated to stick to the same cloud service for every enterprise application and testing environment. They can opt for a multicloud strategy and reap the benefits they offer while planning for longterm growth.
Organizations are increasingly preferring to have a mixed IT environment instead of a homogenous one since it allows teams to design an infrastructure that is tailored to suit their needs and priorities. For instance, a company can host their email and productivity suite on the Google Cloud Platform, their HR payroll processing on Microsoft Azure, and their CRM could be on Zendesk.
This may appear to be a bunch of siloed environments where each cloud functions independently, but it is not always the case. With the right strategies and smart planning, cloud integrations can ensure seamless access, build resilience and ensure minimal loss to productivity.
Security & Compliance
These are the most important aspects of managing a multicloud environment. Typically, a single cloud service would make data security easier to ensure data security. However, a multicloud environment can also be configured to become a fortress against multiple attack vectors.
The different public clouds themselves work to the organization’s advantage in thwarting cyber-attacks because of the use of different cloud service providers. This requires meticulous planning and vulnerability testing, to prevent loss of critical company and user data. In addition to security, compliance is necessary to adhere to the jurisdiction of the countries where the cloud service provider’s datacenter is location. Here, a multi cloud environment is a better option when application performance is being affected or certain services are not available in the region.
Resilience
Business continuity is an important requirement that intends to be always-on for its customers. Organizations can mitigate disruption of cloud services by maintaining a mixed cloud architecture to ensure uninterrupted access with minimal downtime. A service outage, or a planned downtime, will not affect multiple workloads as much as a homogenous setup would. A mixed environment, while increasing the resilience of the overall architecture and ensuring an always-on model, allows IT teams to react to disruptions quickly with minimal loss to productivity and revenue.
Agility & Flexibility
A multi-cloud computing strategy gives organizations the ability to meet regulations and laws specific to a region or country. This approach allows IT service providers and cloud customers be more flexible to implement services at a faster pace and across multiple geographies in accordance to their regulatory laws. An agile architecture also enables customers to respond to market changes faster and scale in a more cost-effective manner as well.
The ability to run workloads on different clouds also minimizes vendor lock-in as well. IT decision makers can choose vendors based on performance, scalability, cost effectiveness, speed and SLAs, pairing workloads with the most ideal cloud option available to unlock a better user experience.
Data Management
Maximizing efficiency does not always require consolidating all enterprise applications and environments on a single cloud service. That said, despite the increased agility and flexibility, organizations will be faced by an ever-expanding data footprint. Even though this presents a daunting challenge to IT departments, they can make it all work with the help of a highly-evolved ecosystem of integration.
Organizations can utilize multi-cloud federation to manage multiple clouds as a single entity, implement cloud orchestration to automate workflows, integrate DevOps to streamline multi-cloud app development across various clouds, adopt cloud native development to build applications that can operate across multiple clouds using microservices, containers, and other techniques, while leveraging multicloud analytics to monitor performance and costs. With the right APIs, techniques and cloud integrations, stakeholders can achieve end-to-end visibility of their data irrespective of where the databases are hosted.
Disaster Recovery
Disruptions due to network outages, power grid failures, cyberattacks, and natural disasters can cripple the ability of an organization to provide an always on service to its stakeholders. A multi-cloud strategy plays a highly effective role in ensuring that an organization is not dependent on a particular cloud provider and can fall back on redundancies in the cloud topology. This allows IT teams to swing into action to automatically switch to an alternative cloud host that has the most recently backed up data. Recovery times in a multi-cloud architecture are faster they help organizations be more agile to ensure high availability.
Cost Optimization
This aspect of multi-cloud management can be complex due to the presence of multiple vendors and varying workloads across different locations. However, these can be effectively managed with the help of data analytics. Dashboards and reports on usage patterns can help IT teams fine-tune hosted solutions based on priorities such as compute, bandwidth, storage throughput, data life cycles and network latency. Moving workloads according to priorities such as these can help IT teams avoid falling into the trap of over-provisioning. This requires monitoring of resources, intelligent allocation of storage to long- and short-term data, and follow DevOps route for provisioning to achieve maximum RoI on multicloud deployments.
Innovation
Improvisation and new cloud technologies is what makes companies successful and make a meaningful long term impact on people's lives. New developments, improvisations in the ecosystem and accelerated digital transformation spurs growth, enabling organizations to provide a seamless customer experience. Innovation in the multicloud space is also what allows businesses to compete effectively and be scalable whenever the need arises.
A multicloud strategy has several benefits that can help make organizations resilient and agile, always available and disaster ready. That said, it may not be the ideal option for every organization, but if implemented smartly, it can help bring about operational efficiency and achieve business objectives whether it is for internal or external facing workloads. The benefits are far too many to be ignored by IT teams. At every step, they must rely on data analytics and dashboards to make insights-driven decisions.
Businesses are not obligated to stick to the same cloud service for every enterprise application and testing environment. They can opt for a multicloud strategy and reap the benefits they offer while planning for longterm growth.
Organizations are increasingly preferring to have a mixed IT environment instead of a homogenous one since it allows teams to design an infrastructure that is tailored to suit their needs and priorities. For instance, a company can host their email and productivity suite on the Google Cloud Platform, their HR payroll processing on Microsoft Azure, and their CRM could be on Zendesk.
This may appear to be a bunch of siloed environments where each cloud functions independently, but it is not always the case. With the right strategies and smart planning, cloud integrations can ensure seamless access, build resilience and ensure minimal loss to productivity.
Security & Compliance
These are the most important aspects of managing a multicloud environment. Typically, a single cloud service would make data security easier to ensure data security. However, a multicloud environment can also be configured to become a fortress against multiple attack vectors.
The different public clouds themselves work to the organization’s advantage in thwarting cyber-attacks because of the use of different cloud service providers. This requires meticulous planning and vulnerability testing, to prevent loss of critical company and user data. In addition to security, compliance is necessary to adhere to the jurisdiction of the countries where the cloud service provider’s datacenter is location. Here, a multi cloud environment is a better option when application performance is being affected or certain services are not available in the region.
Improvisation and new cloud technologies is what makes companies successful and make a meaningful long-term impact on people’s lives
Resilience
Business continuity is an important requirement that intends to be always-on for its customers. Organizations can mitigate disruption of cloud services by maintaining a mixed cloud architecture to ensure uninterrupted access with minimal downtime. A service outage, or a planned downtime, will not affect multiple workloads as much as a homogenous setup would. A mixed environment, while increasing the resilience of the overall architecture and ensuring an always-on model, allows IT teams to react to disruptions quickly with minimal loss to productivity and revenue.
Agility & Flexibility
A multi-cloud computing strategy gives organizations the ability to meet regulations and laws specific to a region or country. This approach allows IT service providers and cloud customers be more flexible to implement services at a faster pace and across multiple geographies in accordance to their regulatory laws. An agile architecture also enables customers to respond to market changes faster and scale in a more cost-effective manner as well.
The ability to run workloads on different clouds also minimizes vendor lock-in as well. IT decision makers can choose vendors based on performance, scalability, cost effectiveness, speed and SLAs, pairing workloads with the most ideal cloud option available to unlock a better user experience.
Data Management
Maximizing efficiency does not always require consolidating all enterprise applications and environments on a single cloud service. That said, despite the increased agility and flexibility, organizations will be faced by an ever-expanding data footprint. Even though this presents a daunting challenge to IT departments, they can make it all work with the help of a highly-evolved ecosystem of integration.
Organizations can utilize multi-cloud federation to manage multiple clouds as a single entity, implement cloud orchestration to automate workflows, integrate DevOps to streamline multi-cloud app development across various clouds, adopt cloud native development to build applications that can operate across multiple clouds using microservices, containers, and other techniques, while leveraging multicloud analytics to monitor performance and costs. With the right APIs, techniques and cloud integrations, stakeholders can achieve end-to-end visibility of their data irrespective of where the databases are hosted.
Disaster Recovery
Disruptions due to network outages, power grid failures, cyberattacks, and natural disasters can cripple the ability of an organization to provide an always on service to its stakeholders. A multi-cloud strategy plays a highly effective role in ensuring that an organization is not dependent on a particular cloud provider and can fall back on redundancies in the cloud topology. This allows IT teams to swing into action to automatically switch to an alternative cloud host that has the most recently backed up data. Recovery times in a multi-cloud architecture are faster they help organizations be more agile to ensure high availability.
Cost Optimization
This aspect of multi-cloud management can be complex due to the presence of multiple vendors and varying workloads across different locations. However, these can be effectively managed with the help of data analytics. Dashboards and reports on usage patterns can help IT teams fine-tune hosted solutions based on priorities such as compute, bandwidth, storage throughput, data life cycles and network latency. Moving workloads according to priorities such as these can help IT teams avoid falling into the trap of over-provisioning. This requires monitoring of resources, intelligent allocation of storage to long- and short-term data, and follow DevOps route for provisioning to achieve maximum RoI on multicloud deployments.
Innovation
Improvisation and new cloud technologies is what makes companies successful and make a meaningful long term impact on people's lives. New developments, improvisations in the ecosystem and accelerated digital transformation spurs growth, enabling organizations to provide a seamless customer experience. Innovation in the multicloud space is also what allows businesses to compete effectively and be scalable whenever the need arises.
A multicloud strategy has several benefits that can help make organizations resilient and agile, always available and disaster ready. That said, it may not be the ideal option for every organization, but if implemented smartly, it can help bring about operational efficiency and achieve business objectives whether it is for internal or external facing workloads. The benefits are far too many to be ignored by IT teams. At every step, they must rely on data analytics and dashboards to make insights-driven decisions.
