multicloud management challenges

Multiple Clouds Make Mastering Cloud Management Even Harder

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If you’ve got cloud—and by now, everyone has got cloud—chances are, you’ve got multicloud. This can result from strategic decisions to obtain specific services from best-in-class providers or the result of not having a cloud strategy and allowing individual departments to make their own cloud picks. Whether multicloud is a deliberate decision or an accident, once you’ve got multiple clouds, you’ve also got additional cloud management challenges.

Multicloud Management Challenges

The multicloud management challenges include:

  • Cost. It’s difficult to get an overall picture of cloud spending when it’s split up over multiple providers with different billing cycles. It’s also difficult to determine if the resources you’re paying for are being utilized efficiently. Some cloud management tools can load all your usage and billing data to provide a comprehensive picture of total costs and utilization, while also allowing you to drill down and see the details of departmental spending.
  • Expertise. It takes time to become familiar with any new technology. Working with multiple cloud providers means your team will have to learn multiple ways of working in the cloud.
  • Migration. Getting to cloud can be difficult and creating migration plans is time consuming. With multiple clouds, you may need to develop different migration strategies for different platforms.
  • Security. Multiple clouds mean more potential security risks. There are more logs to monitor for suspicious activity. It’s hard to ensure policies are applied consistently across different cloud providers with different controls. Defining role-based access controls and leveraging single sign-on also become more challenging.
  • Performance. Because workloads are scattered across multiple clouds, it’s more difficult to monitor and ensure adequate performance. Using multiple clouds can also place more load on your network, especially if the clouds aren’t running isolated services but share data through APIs or other methods.
  • Visibility. Visibility is a problem to some extent even when you have just a single cloud. Visibility into your infrastructure and system status may be limited by the cloud provider and by your inability to access the underlying hardware. Multiple clouds often make visibility even harder because dashboards display only local data; it’s probably necessary to use a third-party tool to achieve consolidated view. In addition, different flavors of cloud—IaaS, PaaS, SaaS—require different levels of monitoring.
  • Automation. Automation and orchestration are key to efficient IT operations; it ensures necessary processes run on time and eliminates manual errors. Again, because multiple clouds have different ways of doing things, it can be complicated to develop a single automation solution across all providers.

Whether you have one cloud or many clouds, cloud solutions from CCS Technology Group ensure they’re managed effectively so your business experiences the benefits of cloud. Contact us to talk about your cloud challenges and how CCS Technology Group can help you solve them.