Enterprise adoption of multi-cloud environments continues to grow, even though managing, optimizing and securing applications across multiple public clouds can be challenging. What would it take to reduce the complexity of a multi-cloud estate?
451 Research recently addressed that very question in a new report, Taming Complexity in the New Multicloud World. In it, they state:
“The ideal technology toolbox for multicloud management covers the waterfront — the overall security posture, provisioning on-premises and public cloud resources, monitoring and remediation, migration and capacity planning, application performance and observability, network visibility, financial governance, and identity and access management.”
To that end, 451 Research identifies five key outcomes an effective multi-cloud solution would provide:
- A unified view of the IT estate that delivers a single source of truth for monitoring resources and usage across clouds, deployment modalities, and roles. This would effectively break down silos and help drive IT accountability throughout the organization.
- A centralized control plane for IT operations teams to set policies, provision resources, monitor performance and identify opportunities for optimization. This could also help address the IT skills gap.
- Integrated security and governance controls, helping to ensure compliant infrastructure provisioning, end-user controls, data protection, and application configuration
- A developer-friendly interface, enabling self-service provisioning of resources for application development and deployment
- An observability platform that captures logs and alerts for cloud operations for faster (and ideally, automated) root-cause analysis and remediation
The report also lays out three recommendations to consider throughout a company’s cloud transformation journey:
- Take a security-first approach, applying security policies consistently across cloud environments and enabling automated remediation
- Think strategically and holistically when evaluating vendors, seeking out those that simplify the complexity of integrating not only multiple cloud platforms but the entire IT lifecycle
- Overcome skills gaps with technology
At VMware, we couldn’t agree more—that’s why we created our VMware Cross-Cloud™ services portfolio of SaaS solutions to address all these points.
Watch this discussion between 451 Research Analyst Jean Atelsek and me on the industry trends we’re seeing in the multi-cloud world—and why companies with multi-cloud environments need to adopt a cross-cloud strategy.
Then, read the report by 451 Research to discover how to tame complexity in the new multi-cloud world.
