WINNING STRATEGY FOR A MULTI-CLOUD WORLD

WINNING STRATEGY FOR A MULTI-CLOUD WORLD HOW NOT TO STUMBLE ALONG THE PATH TO MULTI-CLOUD SUCCESS

For CIOs in the Middle East, the question is no longer whether to move to the public cloud or not, but to decide how to leverage many cloud services available in the market.

It is becoming increasingly common for enterprises to use various cloud service flavors – SaaS, IaaS and PaaS – from a myriad of cloud service providers. It is easy to see why many organisations are heading in the direction of a multi-cloud strategy and hybrid IT environment. It helps CIOs to avoid vendor lock-in, and take advantage of the unique functions and capabilities of different service providers.

The research firm IDC says by 2022, over 90 percent of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of onpremises/private cloud, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs. IDC expects 2021 to be the year of multi-cloud, with the vast majority of enterprises deploying combinations of on-premises, off-premises, public, and private clouds as their default environments.

“Accelerated by COVID-19, we continue seeing a trend in which companies are migrating to the cloud,” says Khaled Al Melhi, CEO of Injazat. “Even organisations who once were reticent are realising the importance of shifting costs from CAPEX to OPEX and, particularly, the numerous benefits of multi-cloud solutions. Firstly, multicloud solutions allow firms to choose from many public cloud providers based on the service they really need and best fits their product. It allows them to ’shop around’ and choose the provider with the best offer. One that makes commercial sense to them. Secondly, it reduces the dependency on one provider and mitigates the risk of having all data compromised in a single breach. Lastly, it allows a more flexible approach to create a highly individualised IT infrastructure that responds to the needs of each client.”

Paulo Pereira, Director, Systems Engineering - Emerging Markets and Eastern Europe at Nutanix, says cloud maturity is growing with most customers using more than 15 cloud services as part of their cloud consumption strategy, reflecting high maturity and adoption of the cloud.

“There are many reasons for organisations to choose a multi-cloud environment. Each benefit associated with a multi-cloud approach can prove instrumental in establishing or maintaining a competitive advantage in today’s digital economy. A solid management tool helps simulate migrations and provides the visibility needed to ensure a seamless inventory, security, migration, and change management,” he says.

While multi-cloud adoption has been gaining momentum, IDC’s META CIO survey 2020 shows not all businesses are sufficiently prepared to implement cloud roadmaps due to migration and skills-related challenges. Just under 30 percent of medium-to-large organisations responding to the IDC survey highlighted migration as a key a challenge, and 39 percent cited a lack of skills as the main hindrance to their cloud strategies.

Melhi from Injazat agrees that navigating a multi-cloud environment can be very complex and seem daunting even to the most seasoned IT professionals. “Faced with dozens of providers that are based around the world, ill-informed decisions can have a negative impact on the company’s infrastructure for years to come. As a long-standing provider of managed services and data centre resources, we not only understand the difficult environment our clients operate in, but we see it as our role to advise and offer guidance to find individualised solutions that work best for our clients,” he says.

As most companies start to use more than just one cloud for their workloads, what does it mean from a data security perspective? Ensuring data protection and compliance across multiple cloud environments can be tricky, and it also

Khaled Al Melhi

gives a larger attack surface to hackers.

The security posture of major cloud providers is as good as or better than most enterprise data centres and security should no longer be considered a primary inhibitor to the adoption of multi-cloud services, according to Pereira.

“However, it is not as simple as moving on-premise workloads to the cloud. Security teams should look to leverage the programmatic infrastructure of public cloud IaaS. Automating as much of the process as possible removes the potential for human error — generally responsible for successful security attacks. The critical driver for success in the cloud world where digital assets are ephemeral can also get provisioned and de-provisioned on demand. Keeping track of security controls needs to be programmatic for ensuring complete cloud compliance,” he says.

Melhi says though public cloud providers have a big interest in keeping their cloud environments safe from threats, a hybrid cloud solution can be a better option if data is important. “One advantage a hybrid-cloud solution - which is a bespoke blend of public, private, remote, and on-premise cloud - offers vis-a-vis the multi-cloud solution is that highly sensitive company and customer data can be stored within the organisation. But again, it all depends on

Paulo Pereira

the individual needs of an organisation and the data they are handling. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to an organisation’s journey to the cloud,” he says.

IT decision makers operating multicloud environments also need to make critical budgeting and investment decisions about their cloud investments because it can easily spiral out of control. This requires a smart cloud cost management strategy, which provides a holistic view of current and forecasted consumption to avoid unwanted billing surprises.

“While public cloud providers offer some level of cloud cost visibility into the projected spend on public cloud services, a similar costing view for data centre or enterprise cloud operations would require accounting for multiple components that are scattered across disconnected data sources. Without a standardised way to provide a single view into current and future data center operating costs, key stakeholders are unable to verify if their cloud environments are running in a cost-efficient manner,” says Pereira from Nutanix.

However, strategic thinking, careful planning and mapping cloud spend against business challenges that need addressing can help you squeeze the most of your multi-cloud environment.