7 tips for cloudy management

More doesn't mean better, except for IT leaders who try to avoid being locked out of the services offered by a single vendor. Flexibility is one of the reasons companies adopt a cloudy strategy, and cloudy means that companies use two or more cloud services from two or more vendors.

Of course, adopting a cloudy model may make IT applications more complex. Some companies use multiple cloud services from multiple cloud computing providers. This is sometimes consistent with a hybrid cloud architecture that integrates a public and private cloud environment with a local infrastructure.

Perhaps corporate IT staff already have knowledge of multiple SaaS applications from multiple vendors. However, when companies add it to a broader portfolio of public cloud environments, they want to truly optimize their ongoing management, including IaaS and PaaS. And ensuring that it correctly distinguishes between different environments and types of services is a key step in itself.

If the company is ready to take its cloudy strategy to a higher level, then cloud computing experts will elaborate on the skills and secrets of using multiple public clouds as a cloudy strategy.

1. Define your own efficiency goals

How can companies use and manage multiple public clouds efficiently? Then it is better to show your intentions more specifically. Pursuing "efficiency" in abstraction sounds good, but it is unlikely to produce results. The same is true if the company has set “enhanced efficiency” as one of the goals of the overall cloudy strategy.

“Computer scientists like to call this efficiency a 'fuzzy term' that can't be quantified like words like short, high, near, far, slow, and fast,” said Jeremy Vance, vice president of cloud computing technology at Pabst Brewing in the US, “ Maintaining ongoing management of multiple public cloud environments depends on the company's definition of efficiency."

Vance pointed out that the cost efficiency of the enterprise is very different from the development efficiency, and the development efficiency is different from the end user support efficiency (depending on the number of employees).

2. Beware of pricing issues

Vance says that when organizations prioritize cost optimization with multiple public clouds, there are often issues. This can have a negative impact on end users and the entire organization.

Vance shares examples of the consequences of “efficiency” strategies that can be counterproductive when cost is an important factor, such as data latency caused by the option of the lowest price.

Please pay attention to the following points when managing multiple public clouds:

For the lowest cost cloud service for the application platform and database platform, if two of the platforms are in different environments, there may be application performance issues due to query database latency.

Purchasing a low-cost application framework that is inconsistent with the skills of enterprise employees requires companies to use higher-cost resources to support the platform or be subject to vendor lock-in. If preventing vendor lock-in is one of the key reasons for achieving a cloudy strategy, then vendor lock-in will be an annoying problem.

When purchasing the lowest-priced cloud services from multiple vendors, licensing, integration, and other hidden costs are not considered, and these costs can quickly increase user costs, thereby offsetting the savings in purchasing costs.

3. Building a cloudy skill strategy

Businesses expect teams to apply learning curve, especially in the early stages of adding and managing multiple public cloud services. If the company has limited public cloud experience and skills, the curve can be particularly steep.

Amin Lalji, senior manager at EY Canada, and a certified cloud computing architect and cloud security instructor at Learning Tree International, advises companies to be highly strategic in building the experience and skills of cloudy maturity, which is not going to happen overnight.

“Enterprise pilot projects and testing and QA environments may be public clouds and the preferred choice for corporate cloud strategies,” Lalji said. “Companies first implement and gain maturity in these areas, mitigate operational and security risks, and allow companies to have the opportunity to build and Coordinate the governance and operational processes required to truly benefit from a cloudy strategy."

4. Do not assume automatic redundancy

The advantage of using multiple public cloud platforms as part of an overall cloudy strategy is that organizations can gain greater flexibility in the event of service disruptions, security breaches, and other events. However, organizations should not expect workloads that run in two or more public cloud environments to automatically be redundant and get the associated benefits.

"Companies need to ensure that continuity, disaster recovery, and security processes are redundant to ensure a robust cloud strategy," said Eric Sanders, cloud computing solution architect at ShoreGroup.

As Red Hat technology evangelist Gordon Haff recently pointed out: "People's suspicions about public cloud security sometimes seem to depend on other people's attitudes toward security."

5. Differentiate public cloud service types

The term “public cloud” has a broad connotation. In order to effectively manage multiple public cloud services, companies should correctly distinguish between different service types, such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Companies want to prioritize the needs of these cloud types rather than using a unified set of requirements for a “public cloud” or pursuing similar broad goals.

Vance says, for example, for organizations that use multiple SaaS offerings, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, human resources platforms, and email, vendor support for single sign-on should be a priority.

Sanders pointed out that such prioritization exercises should also help companies make strategic choices in the categories. For example, he believes that vertical industries such as the retail industry are beginning to favor specific platforms or another platform for IaaS based on industry-specific needs.

6. Adopting two public cloud platforms may be enough

Similarly, a better distinction under the protection of a “public cloud” can help companies adjust the size of their public cloud service portfolio based on overall cloudiness. For example, IaaS. Sanders believes that for some organizations, the adoption of two public cloud platforms may be sufficient to meet the needs of most organizations. Of course, this is specific to the company, so this is a rule of thumb, not a law.

7. Enterprise demand continues to closely match cloud services

In fact, the enterprise manages multiple public clouds and their overall cloudy strategy, which is due to which cloud platforms are better able to meet the well-thought-out specific decisions of the organization's needs.

“Cloudy, driven by the architectural vision, ultimately comes down to management decisions that require specific criteria for when to use and when to use specific cloud provider services,” Lalji said.