Mind the 'Multi-Cloud' Gap

Imagine how frustrating it must be for a company looking to make its first move to the public cloud.

Meticulously dressed consultants in gleaming black shoes will tell you: “You are already late to the game.” Even worse: “Already 85% of companies have a multi-cloud strategy, and you are nowhere!”.

Guess what, being late to the game might be your most significant advantage! Early adopters had to learn it the hard way. You can do it the first time right.

Eight things to keep in mind preparing your public cloud strategy:

One cloud at a time

The multi-cloud story promising cost-efficiency, agility, and the ultimate antidote against vendor lock-in surely is an excellent sales pitch! If you think twice, you must feel there is a catch. Transforming your traditional IT landscape to the cloud is already challenging enough. Trying to jump on multiple clouds at the same time will hold you back!

Of course, it is a great idea to keep your options open.

Connectivity

It all depends on your specific situation, but many companies realize that internet VPN connections are not the best way to assure a high-speed, reliable connection to their cloud provider. An “ExpressRoute” or “Direct Connect” is a safe bet for connecting to your cloud of choice.

A provider that can leverage flexible connectivity into many clouds via a single access channel is even better. Cloud connectivity brokers offer access to multiple hyper-scale cloud providers and can provide reliable connectivity into popular SAAS platforms such as Office 365 and SalesForce.

Skills

Speaking about gaps. Don’t assume your experienced IT staff only needs to follow some training or will learn things organically. Even when your on-premise IT operations run smoothly at the moment, successfully operating your cloud services requires a different way of working! Think DevOps, think Cloud-native! Think Saas, before Paas before IaaS.

You can lift-and-shift your virtual machines to the public cloud and move some databases to a PaaS solution, but that’s not what cloud is all about!

Although cloud providers implement their services in similar ways, each cloud requires specific skills, certainly when you want to move beyond traditional IaaS services.

A new role for the IT Department

Besides acquiring new skills, over time, your infrastructure engineers will move into a new position.

Instead of being busy deploying and operating the IT infrastructure, they leave the bigger part of these activities to automated workflows and self-service cloud portals. It’s no longer about being in the process but about facilitating and overseeing it.

Keep Costs under control

One of the significant advantages of a public cloud model; is that you can provision resources at the click of a button. And you only pay for what you use, right? Some key things to take into account:

• Oversized resources will generate unwanted costs.
• Do not forget to de-provision resources that are no longer in use. Avoid “Cloud-sprawl.”
• Make sure to charge-back your cloud costs to your internal customers a.k.a the business.
• Shut down systems and services when they are not needed.
• Reserving capacity upfront is cheaper than consuming everything in a pay-as-you-go model.
• Running everything on virtual machines (IaaS) usually is not the most economical way to run your applications in the cloud.

Keeping tabs on Security and Compliance

The public cloud allows implementing top-notch security features that would not be achievable for most companies in an on-premise setting. Nevertheless, this does not mean your cloud workloads are secure by default. Unintentionally exposing confidential data to the public internet by incorrectly configuring a cloud service happens faster than you imagine. Emphasize on cloud security from the start and regularly assess your security posture to avoid unpleasant surprises.

When it comes to compliance, hyper-scale cloud providers offer a platform that meets a vast range of industry compliance standards. However, this doesn’t mean that your applications running on the cloud platform are compliant by default. When operating in a regulated industry, it is primordial to assess regularly against compliance standards relevant to your business.

Disaster recovery

Most companies running in a traditional datacenter have disaster recovery plans in place. When moving to a public cloud, improving the resilience of your applications by deploying them into multiple cloud zones and even regions across the continent becomes reasonably straightforward and easy to achieve. Nevertheless, defining your disaster recovery strategy and regularly testing it remains as crucial as before.

A cloud-agnostic Architecture

Finding a proper balance between vendor-agnostic and vendor-specific cloud services is often a tough choice.

Trying to avoid vendor lock-in where possible is, of course, a no-brainer. At the same time, cloud provider-specific analytics, AI or IoT,… services allow for a fast and efficient implementation of complex functionalities.

The commonly accepted best practice here is to use open frameworks and technology stacks for commodity workloads but not to fear using vendor-specific solutions for highly specialized services.

Once you dealt with all these challenges and made it through your first successful cloud adoption journey, you are ready to make an informed decision on whether to add another provider to your cloud landscape!