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It is part of Solutions Review’s premium content series, a collection of contributed columns written by industry experts in mature software categories. In this submission, VMware VP and CTO Amanda Blevins outlines the most common multi-cloud challenges that IT services can solve.
Multi-cloud environments offer significant business benefits, from increased agility to increased efficiency. However, adopting a multi-cloud infrastructure too quickly without having the right tools and strategies in place can introduce operational complexity that many users are not prepared to manage. If the infrastructure you’re using to build new, innovative apps and solutions for your customers is complex, your ability to innovate quickly becomes limited.
The challenge with using different clouds is that they exist in isolated silos, each with its own development and operating model, taxonomy, services, APIs, and management tools. This lack of consistency across clouds forces enterprises to manage multi-cloud environments using a patchwork of off-the-shelf, custom-built and native cloud service provider tools.
This often also requires specialized teams and new skills to leverage the innovative capabilities of each cloud environment. Because of these differences, application and development teams struggle to quickly troubleshoot performance issues when they occur. Operators find it difficult to consistently enforce policies to ensure applications are secure and compliant wherever they are deployed.
Here are the top five multicloud challenges many modern organizations are experiencing.
1. Differences in infrastructure, APIs, databases, networks, and security structures
2. Cost and time to refactor applications for new public cloud environments
3. Risks related to security, data and privacy issues related to local data regulations
4. Increased Complexity with Dedicated Tools
5. Staff Training and Specialized Skills Needed to Support Public Cloud
IT teams initially addressed these challenges by consolidating cloud environments and embracing services built on seamless abstraction layers across multiple clouds. Virtualization has made it possible to abstract finite physical infrastructure assets, storage arrays, and network devices all to operate independently in the data center. It enables organizations to build, deploy, run, manage, secure, and access their applications and infrastructure in a consistent and 100% software-based way. The rise of virtualization has ushered in an era of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and hyperscale cloud providers.
With most organizations now using multiple cloud providers for their apps and infrastructure, IT teams face a different pattern of operational complexity. For developers, each cloud provider has its own infrastructure, interfaces, and APIs. For operators, each additional cloud adds architectural complexity, fragmented security, performance optimization and cost control.
As in the past, this new approach to multi-cloud complexity requires the use of disparate cloud services to enable horizontal development and operational capabilities without blocking access to each cloud provider’s unique portfolio of services. It starts by creating a layer of abstraction that spans your entire cloud environment. However, organizations must simultaneously consider how to build, manage, manage, and optimize apps and workloads across multicloud environments.
Entering the era of multi-cloud services
Instead of managing cloud environments in customized ways, organizations can implement multicloud services to address comprehensive multicloud challenges. A rapidly emerging category of IT services, multicloud services are key to helping organizations implement multicloud strategies that simplify and streamline development, operations, networking, and security across clouds. . They provide consistent APIs, object models, identity management, and other core functionality across clouds and run in one or more of the following scenarios:
- On a single cloud, but supports interaction with at least two different clouds.
- Multiple clouds support interaction with at least two different clouds.
- Basic operations are fully automated on any cloud or edge, even in disconnected mode.
Multicloud services enable organizations to standardize cloud infrastructure and operations, development, and security functions onto a single platform, reducing or eliminating the complexity of independently building or using the same native services from multiple clouds. increase. This benefits businesses in a number of ways.
Operators can deploy, manage, and monitor apps and container infrastructure the same way for all clouds. This reduces operational overhead while minimizing the need for specialized teams when dealing with a particular cloud. This creation of “skills portability” also allows developers and operators to use the same skills across multiple cloud platforms through consistent services and APIs, allowing developers to control the infrastructure and apps running on them. You’ll be able to build apps using your preferred framework without worrying about cloud computing.
Additionally, this abstraction helps security teams minimize risk by enabling them to apply policies consistently across all clouds and apps. Ultimately, businesses accelerate time to market and realize quantifiable improvements in app performance, efficiency, and security. Companies in regulated industries can also meet their own sovereign cloud requirements and maintain jurisdiction while achieving large-scale, cutting-edge transformation.
There are currently several types of core categories of multicloud services, such as application services, infrastructure services, security services, and end-user services. These are high-level categories, and we plan to define more specific service categories and entirely new services over time.
Multicloud complexity is best addressed by a rich Platform as a Service (PaaS) layer of multicloud services. This layer provides enterprises with a wide range of capabilities to build, run, manage and secure applications consistently across clouds. By abstracting the complexity of multicloud, enterprises can reach new levels of agility and growth without compromising sovereignty or security.
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