You may have seen our previous blog post, that shared insights and actions that organisations and individuals could consider to better leverage their hybrid cloud environments. In this post we’ll be following a similar suit, though this time looking at multi-cloud environments.
In today’s current technology landscape, many organisations are leveraging multi-cloud to meet a variety of business needs. Arguably, multi-cloud is the core of adaptability when it comes to public cloud, allowing organisations to leverage different cloud services from different cloud providers. Best of both worlds, right?
We have a saying here in Quinticon, “leverage strengths and support weaknesses”, and as a cross-functional team this is something that has played a key part in our success to date. You can think of multi-cloud in a similar way; leveraging the strengths of different cloud providers where these add value to your business and supporting their weaknesses by having the adaptability and flexibility to pick only the services you want from each cloud provider.
Below are a few key actions you can consider to help you maximise the return on investment for multi-cloud environments.
Perform workload assessments – perform regular assessments on the performance of your workloads on multiple clouds, to identify any bottlenecks and performance gaps. Performing workload assessments will provide better visiblity on your various clouds performance. Using a multi-cloud approach gives you the flexibility to move workloads between providers if they are not meeting requirements.
Leverage cloud-agnostic tools such as Terraform – a popular tool used for delivering infrastructure as code and multi-cloud provisioning, Terraform has a particularly strong use case when it comes to multi-cloud due to its cloud-agnostic capabilities. This means you can deploy and maintain AWS, Azure and GCP workloads using the same tool.
Standardise naming conventions, tools and processes across multiple clouds –establishing consistent and uniform practices across multiple cloud platforms can mitigate the complexities associated with each of your cloud vendors terminologies – standardising the finer details for each individual cloud. This standardisation creates improved engineering efficiency, giving users the ability to select providers based upon strengths, with minimal impact on downstream documentation and management.
Classify and tier data to minimise costly transfers between clouds – have a data management strategy that optimises the storage and movement of data across different cloud providers or cloud services. This strategy involves categorising and organising data based on its importance, access frequency, and usage patterns. Storing and managing it accordingly will help to reduce expenses associated with data transfers between clouds – allowing you to leverage multi-cloud in a more cost-effective way.
Leverage cloud placement tools – third party and native cloud placement tools will help by selecting the most effective cloud location that will accommodate each workload’s needs, at the least expense. These tools can take into consideration data gravity, licence costs, vendor support and other factors to help define the best location – helping you to select the right home for your workload.
Have a single pane of glass to control, monitor and report on your multi-cloud environment – having a single portal/console to manage your multiple cloud environments will reduce the complexity, time and effort associated with managing multiple tools – improving efficiency, visiblity and consistency of monitoring and managing your workloads.
In summary, these actions, alongside many others, can help maximise your organisation’s multi-cloud investments. Engineers and managers alike play crucial roles in optimising resources, enhancing security, and ensuring cost-effectiveness, and need to always be looking for improvements. In the ever-evolving cloud landscape, multi-cloud plays a pivotal role in organisational adaptability and competitiveness.