Avoid Cloud Sprawl: Bring Transparency to Your Multi-Cloud Strategy

The very function of the cloud may make a multi-cloud strategy seem unnecessary at best. But there are several good reasons an organization may choose not to use a single cloud provider. First, if an organization has sensitive data that requires compliance with different standards, they may not be able to find a single provider that can ensure compliance for all of their data.

A multi-cloud strategy also reduces the risk of vendor lock-in and allows a company to create a software stack that is independent of the underlying infrastructure. For true redundancy, companies are looking to multiple clouds to avoid severe data loss should one of their cloud providers go down.

Finally, companies may find that different cloud providers offer similar services with very different pricing options, so enlisting a new provider to increase storage or add the functionality of new apps may be more cost-effective than simply upscaling the existing plan they have with a current provider. This lets specific workloads be run where it will be most efficient.

Challenges of a Multi-Cloud Strategy

Keeping track of activities through multiple clouds can become complicated. For instance, each provider has a log-in portal with a proprietary user interface and may also have unique requirements for password complexity. Without a central access portal or single sign-on interface, even the simple act of accessing different cloud solutions can be an unnecessary hassle. Because of this, organizations are struggling with cloud sprawl.

Cloud sprawl is the uncontrolled proliferation of an organization’s cloud instances, services or providers.

Cloud sprawl typically occurs when an organization lacks visibility or control over its cloud computing resources. Without holistic transparency into all cloud resources, organizations are seeing much larger spends than necessary due to over-provisioning or stagnant, unused resources.

Benefits of a Multi-Cloud Management Platform

CloudHelm’s multi-cloud management platform offers the benefits of using more than one cloud platform while mitigating the issues that can arise as a result of the increased complexity. In addition to allowing users to manage multiple cloud platforms from a single interface, it can provide information on how much is being spent on each provider, where resources are being wasted, and proactively recommend ways to help improve efficiency.

CloudHelm can also provide analytics on workloads including predictive analytics, and it allows comparisons of pricing with different models to ensure the user’s spending is as efficient as possible. Any organization with this tool at their disposal can get the best of AWS, Azure, and Google cloud services for any processes, workflows, or data storage they need without the headaches.

Contact us today to learn more.

/0 Comments/by

The Importance of Multi-Cloud Management

Cloud services can be daunting to set up and maintain – and engaging with multi-cloud services can be even more intimidating. Even so, there are benefits to using a multi-cloud strategy, whatever your approach within it might be. Disaster recovery becomes easier if your important or sensitive data is kept redundantly across multiple servers. A multi-cloud strategy also means that as you need more resources during especially busy times, you have the ability to scale and offload any processing necessary quickly. Alternatively, you can route requests to different cloud servers which are optimized for specific tasks.

At first glance, you might think the terms “multi-cloud” and “hybrid cloud” mean the same thing, but there is a distinction. Public cloud services are cheap and accessible, allowing you to pay only for what you need as you use it. However, you get what you pay for, as it is a shared resource. A private cloud is specifically assigned to one client, allowing them access to its full resources. A hybrid cloud combines these approaches, which allows (for instance) using public cloud resources when your private cloud is hitting its max load. A multi-cloud strategy can be comprised of any or all of these approaches.

As you can imagine, using multiple cloud servers can be challenging to manage. You will need a way to check the performance of each server and navigate what information is kept on each. There is also the issue of vendor lock; if you wish to use the advantages of cloud servers from multiple vendors for different purposes, you either need to make do with one vendor or pay extra for multiple services.

A good cloud management platform (CMP) can give you the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy while taking the challenges off your shoulders. CloudHelm Control allows you to easily manage multiple cloud services in a unified interface. By giving you the ability to see that all is well in each of your cloud platforms through a single pane of glass, we make it easy to monitor changes and updates without the need for multiple interfaces for different cloud services. In fact, you can even manage cloud solutions through CloudHelm Control without in-depth knowledge of the cloud framework itself.

If you are interested in the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy without the hassle that goes with managing a multi-cloud environment, contact CloudHelm today.

/0 Comments/by

Cloud Management: Driving Multi-Cloud Adoption

,

In 2015, cloud users leveraged more clouds than ever before. According to the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report, companies using the cloud are averaging the management of 3 public and 3 private clouds. Who would have thought that 6 clouds would be the average? And why 6 and not 2 or 12?

It’s also interesting to note that the report further broke down the types of clouds environments that are run by Enterprises. Enterprises are running applications on 1.5 public and 1.7 private clouds and experimenting with 1.5 public and 1.3 private clouds.

6 Reasons for the Management of 6 Clouds:

  1. As large public cloud providers become more commoditized, more niche offerings are created that are better suited for specific applications, industries, etc.
  2. IT professionals with one cloud option are realizing that there are unexpected costs and inefficiencies with having only one cloud service provider.
  3. Increase in experimenting with different cloud types as businesses spend more money on migrating daily work processes outside of dev ops.
  4. Workload migration across clouds is easier but not yet seamless.
  5. There are still major challenges in expertise, cloud security, and compliance for Enterprises.
  6. Cost management of multiple clouds is difficult to optimize.

Why not less than 6 Clouds?

The use of cloud services is fragmented by department needs. Major departments using the cloud include: IT and development, marketing and sales, and HR. Central IT and business decision makers are more involved because technology is moving closer to the business. This means that business advantages of the cloud are more important for aligning the right cloud services for an Enterprise organization.

Many Enterprises may have one business focus but several department and industry needs may change the type of cloud service provider that can align both. In addition, more workloads are moving to the cloud than ever before and more dollars are being spend on technologies that can manage daily work processes.

With the increase in cloud service provider options, dev ops teams are finding that experimenting with different cloud types is beneficial to finding better options for building, testing and running specific applications.

Why not more than 6 Clouds?

It’s simply difficult to manage multiple clouds. Many Enterprises have yet to adopt a cloud management platform (CMP) that enables multi-cloud management and seamless workload migration across clouds. CMPs with multiple cloud service provider options will be more beneficial to an organization than trying to leverage a single cloud service provider across an entire organization.

The adoption of CMPs should increase drastically as platform providers continue to develop towards the needs of users and efficiency and ease of use are realized by Enterprises. An Enterprise’s biggest challenge is their lack of resources and cloud expertise – which slows down adoption and usage rates.

Also, security and compliance are still a major challenge to extend the use of cloud across an organization. Lastly, we need to face the fact that cloud costs aren’t as cheap as we all think, and it is difficult to manage costs and optimize a multi-cloud environment without the right management platform.

Why is multi-cloud a good option with the right CMP today?

  • Reduces risk through redundancy
  • IT can shut down specific services that were vulnerable to one cloud without shutting down everything
  • Cloud providers may increase prices and terms
  • Niche clouds are built to better suite specific business needs
/0 Comments/by