Four Things to Solve in a Multi-Cloud World

Multi-Cloud guest post by John O’Donoghue, Solution Consultant for the Data Centre Compute Group, Dell Technologies Ireland

Whether it was intentional, or the by-product of many groups independently selecting multiple cloud vendors, it’s highly likely many organisations in Ireland are operating in multiple clouds. These clouds span different public cloud providers and private clouds, which could be hosted on-premises, co-located or in edge locations.

While the vast majority of businesses operate with multiple clouds, there remains a challenge of managing them all in a simplified, holistic fashion. There are trade-offs in moving workloads to public clouds. Public clouds offer benefits such as giving developers programmatic access to resources faster, lower upfront costs, simplified scalability, and access to consumable value-added services. Meanwhile, on-premises computing typically offers better long-term costs, faster response times, and ultimate control over applications, security and compliance.

Regardless of the combination of clouds, and which applications are hosted where, operating with multiple clouds is the new reality, and with it comes some serious challenges to overcome.

1. Migration, Re-platforming and Re-factoring

The first issue is simply getting to public clouds in the first place. Monolithic application architectures are ill-suited to reap the full cloud benefits from both a cost and capabilities standpoint. This often means protracted and costly professional services are required to fully take advantage of public clouds and that introduces delays to innovation and uncertainty.

Then there is the move itself. Most businesses cannot afford downtime so sending multiple virtual machines up to public clouds, hooking them to a database, presenting the relevant data, testing the entire configuration, and only then flipping the switch to shift a production workload to the cloud creates a complex and time-consuming maze to navigate. This is more pronounced as an organisation’s IT team layer on additional cloud vendors who have their own distinct methods, infrastructure and architecture.

2. Developer Methodologies and Skill Sets

There’s an old saying that goes, “what got you here, will not get you there,” and this applies to application development. With the speed and agility cloud offers, the stakes are raised for developers. Agile methodologies and DevOps are the paths many organizations take, but this also means developers need to master skills that were traditionally the realm of IT Operations and Security personnel.

In fact, while developers often discuss “DevOps,” there is irony in the addition of “Ops” as often developers choose a path that removes typical operations teams and discipline from the picture. In many cases, sidestepping “Ops” leads developers to return to IT operations needing help. Therefore, it’s critical to develop a true “DevOps” practice where there is close collaboration between an organisation’s developers and operational leads to ensure the long-term viability and stability of newly developed applications wherever they are hosted.

Finally, many of the services that are available to consume on public clouds will require learning new coding languages and a greater familiarity with designing applications that take advantage of API calls. These factors put a substantial burden on developers and IT staff to broaden their skill sets and responsibilities.

3. Day to Day Operations

Cloud simplifies and shifts a lot of IT operations responsibility to the vendor, but that doesn’t mean businesses in Ireland can take their eye off the ball. At Dell Technologies Ireland, we’ve found that the simplicity of cloud development and perception of lower operational complexity has led to the development of more fragile operating environments that are still plagued by regular outages. Operations (Ops) discipline is critical because there isn’t less to do—there is usually more, and it can be more nuanced than traditional architectures.

Additionally, complexity increases greatly as additional vendors come on-board. It can be difficult to evaluate costs and service levels across multiple environments as each one often comes with its own tools.

4. Security and Regulatory Compliance

With cloud comes a new operational paradigm. Built from the ground up to be open and accessible from anywhere in the world, cloud comes with an increased attack surface as well as added compliance requirements. Existing security approaches often are not portable to public clouds, which means organizations must implement new policies.

For those who are less familiar with cloud operating principles, it is easy to introduce vulnerabilities. On the occasion that an infrastructure vulnerability, such as a switch port or a CPU bug, arises, the customer relies on timely notification of the issue from the vendor. As data flows across clouds or even different regions, the security and regulatory compliance requirements can become time-consuming to address.

Don’t Fix Four Problems, Solve for One.

These issues are enough to keep any IT department very busy, and there are several ways to go about solving for each. However, there is a much simpler path to multi-cloud, and that is through a consistent hybrid approach.

As you evolve your cloud strategy, with whatever combination of public and private clouds, taking a hybrid cloud approach with consistent operations and management of applications, wherever they reside, has become the simplest approach.

Rather than continually churning and conforming to changes introduced by vendors, changing IT staff, or onboarding new cloud service providers, a consistent hybrid approach using industry-leading virtualization technologies can create the rapid and sustainable multi-cloud platform that keeps organisations in control. This is a tried and true approach that has enabled businesses across Ireland to bring order and stability to their IT environments, and it is now possible to do the same for the cloud.

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