What is multi-cloud management, and how can it benefit your business?

Nearly three out of four organizations use multiple clouds to deliver benefits like cost-saving opportunities and freedom from being locked into a single cloud vendor. But with the benefits of multiple clouds comes a new challenge: Multi-cloud management. When you need to interconnect environments hosted on different cloud platforms, your approach to managing networks, security policies, storage and more must adapt.

Keep reading for a breakdown of what multi-cloud management means, why managing multiple clouds is harder than managing a single cloud and how a multi-cloud management solution can help businesses take full advantage of a multi-cloud architecture without being overwhelmed by management headaches.

What is multi-cloud management?

Multi-cloud management is the practice of configuring, monitoring and troubleshooting workloads or IT environments hosted on more than one cloud platform and even in multiple locations within the same cloud platform.

Today, most businesses have adopted multi-cloud strategies, meaning they use more than one cloud platform at the same time. For example, a firm might deploy some applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others on Microsoft Azure Cloud, two of the most widely used public cloud platforms. Or, they may use a public cloud in conjunction with private cloud infrastructure that they have set up in their own data center.

When an organization opts to leverage more than one cloud, it needs a way to manage all its cloud environments efficiently and reliably. Multi-cloud management makes this possible.

The challenges of managing multiple clouds

The challenge of multi-cloud management isn't just that you have more than one cloud environment to configure and monitor. The real difficulty stems from the possibility that cloud services and configurations available on one cloud platform may not integrate natively with those of other cloud platforms.

Consequently, securely connecting IT resources hosted on one cloud with those running on another can become a real challenge. You can't simply take an Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy configured for AWS and apply it to Azure, for example, because AWS and Azure use different IAM frameworks and rules. Consequently, enforcing a consistent set of access control rules across clouds can be challenging, leading to potential security gaps if engineers struggle to translate IAM settings from one cloud to another.

Nor can you use a monitoring tool designed for one cloud (such as AWS CloudWatch) to monitor workloads running on a different public or private cloud. Monitoring tools built into each cloud platform may not work with other platforms. In many cases, a monitoring tool built by one cloud vendor to help manage workloads hosted on its platform can not collect or analyze data from other clouds.

The problem with a siloed approach to multi-cloud management

One approach is to treat each cloud platform as a distinct environment without attempting to integrate them. This is feasible, but it subjects businesses to several drawbacks and makes it much harder to reap the benefits of opting to use multiple clouds in the first place. Drawbacks include:

• Lack of integration: Without a centralized multi-cloud manager, integrating workloads hosted in different clouds is difficult, according to FutureCIO. For example, you may not be able to move data from one application to another or apply a consistent set of networking and security policies to all applications.
• Greater support burden: If you manage each cloud separately, your IT department must learn and support a wider variety of tools, because it will need to use separate solutions for each cloud, leading to inefficiency.
• Migration challenges: Without centralized management solutions that work across clouds, moving workloads from one cloud to another becomes harder. This means you may miss out on cost-savings or performance opportunities that you could leverage through migration.
• Redundancy: Siloed cloud environments may lead to redundancy. If your business runs instances of the same types of workloads in different clouds, it can be difficult to consolidate or integrate them because each workload will depend on different configurations and management tools.

Advantages of Multi-Cloud Managed Services 

To solve these challenges, you need to centralize and streamline management of your networking, monitoring, security and other workflows across all of your cloud environments, without relying on the tools offered by a specific cloud vendor or platform. When you do this using multi-cloud manager tools, you replace a siloed, inefficient approach to multi-cloud management with one like Verizon’s Network as a Service Cloud Management solution which delivers the following benefits for a multi-cloud infrastructure:

• Improved integration: IT assets that integrate and interconnect across clouds make it easy to move data between—and apply consistent configurations to—workloads that span more than one cloud environment.
• More efficient support: Firms benefit from the ability to monitor and manage all cloud resources through a single pane of glass, reducing the management burden placed on IT teams and lowering total cloud management costs.
• Streamlined management: NaaS provides simplified network management across clouds because businesses can apply the same connections quickly and securely on all cloud environments that they use.
• Reduced error risk: There is a lower risk of configuration mistakes that could lead to performance or security issues. When you configure and manage everything centrally and consistently, the risk of oversights declines significantly.
• Load balancing and resiliency: If there is an issue with performance or up-time with an application on one cloud provider, it is possible to move that demand to an application instance on another cloud provider.

This outcome is a win for cloud administration teams who can manage multiple clouds more effectively and with less effort. It's also a win for the business, which can take full advantage of a multi-cloud model without becoming constrained by management challenges or application performance issues.

Learn more about how Verizon's Network as a Service Cloud Management offering can simplify multi-cloud management for your organization.

The author of this content is a paid contributor for Verizon.