Managing a Multi Cloud Environment
Cloud computing has taken over in recent years with the launch of public and private cloud networks. With organizations taking on more workloads and changing business goals, the use of multi-cloud technology is becoming increasingly common. According to a Gartner survey, 81% of public cloud users choose two or more providers
Multi-Cloud technology supports companies as a whole, but the engineering and operations teams directly benefit from this. The key benefits of using multi-cloud include preventing lock-in by suppliers, personalized solutions, reducing risks, and saving costs
Ten tips that will help you in managing a Multi-Cloud Environment:
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Opening Prices and Exposure: A multi-cloud approach can make costing and allocation difficult at times, as the servers are in the data center of different entities, and billing methods can also vary among providers of communication services.Use appropriate tools, advisors, resources, and managed services to help companies determine what they are using and how much it costs them around the enterprise. This expertise assists companies in reducing prices for providers. Have a standardized solution on how the billing will be handled for the various providers.
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Dynamic Catalogue: Today consumers demand almost immediate access to a variety of resources and software, not just what the company's central IT organization offers. The problem is that the organization's self-service store must be modified if an external vendor changes its product, service, or technology so that the deal is displayed correctly. Otherwise, customers may stop using the self-service shop, and the company may lose control of management. However, keeping up with the changes can be time-consuming, potentially involving the growth, contract, procurement, and legal departments of the company.
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Standardized Consumables: A business unit within an enterprise uses resources from many different providers in a multi-cloud environment. Business units also pay in different ways for such facilities. A business unit could acquire services through a web portal, buy directly via a sales representative, or issue a Cloud contract. This scenario can quickly become almost impossible for central IT and procurement to manage, compounded by the number of business units in an organization— especially when such services will need to be changed in the future.
The key to this best practice is standardizing cloud service, using self-service tools. Look for a solution that offers customers a central portal to compare and purchase cloud-based services and enables IT and procurement professionals to handle usage in a consistent, unified manner.
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Value Added Facilities: Today, consumers often want offerings such as voice messaging, caller identification, and expect a company to combine those services. When it comes to aggregating cloud-based resources, centralized IT practitioners may help in adding value to customer services by understanding conditions of regulatory enforcement in which the company serves its customers.
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Integration is Important: As companies purchase an increasing variety of IT services from multiple service providers, they can face numerous challenges, including cost escalation, lack of reliability, slow delivery, and visibility problems. IT needs shared standards for supplier ecosystem integration and management to help tackle these issues. Networks are another critical component of multi-cloud integration, and must also be built to enable businesses to run their applications in a hybrid computing environment
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Unobstructed Access: The goal of creating a central IT-sponsored self-service platform is not to discourage consumers from making their transactions, but rather to make the self-service store a convenient and familiar experience.
Allow the key users to recommend products to be reviewed and pre-approved for the self-service store of the company to assist customers with the same quick access to resources as if they were heading directly to a cloud provider. Any item that meets organizational expectations can be released as a reliable service to be used by the rest of the organization.
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Handle User Management Issues: Large corporations have complex organizational structures in place, especially multinational organizations, which help decide who can gain access to which applications and data. The aim is to balance the existing directory and other user management systems within the organization. An enterprise should expand current systems for multi-cloud management by applying best practices, predefined integrations, and automation .
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Use Machine-To-Machine System: Using the DevOps approach will help dramatically in shortening the time for new applications to market its services. It is about changing the criterion. Imagine a smart DevOps toolchain that orders certain services via APIs as required. Instead of one person attempting to complete a dozen orders in one hour from an online database, a computer may position the order quickly by APIs.
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Changes in IT Role IT is the central body responsible for the company's construction services. Many organizations are the infrastructure builders in the multi-cloud environment, which helps IT in combining customer-oriented services and becoming an operator of supply chain services.
With the change in technology and market environment, many conventional roles change, including:-
CIOs are contract and procurement specialists who handle the supply chain and the vendor
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Brand managers are responsible for curating catalogs and understanding how to price products and selling them
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Worker operations manage both conventional and cloud models
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IT to Work in Two Connected Models: The IT environment is currently a mixture of traditional infrastructure that requires continued support to allow cloud-growth. Such activities have their internal processes that require centralized management. Also, with a DevOps model, IT remains in charge of ongoing maintenance, optimization, and cost control. A company with hybrid cloud tooling and experience will help to provide an integrated management tool.
Whatever direction you take towards multi-cloud, based on the experience of other organizations who have made this journey, you will benefit from the main takeaways stated above. The multi-cloud environment is exciting, and being prepared and ready with best practices will promote cloud adoption and benefits.