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How To Overcome The Challenges Of Gaining Multi-Cloud Interoperability

Forbes Technology Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Ruslan Synytsky

Multi-cloud is defined as an approach that combines more than one cloud (public or private) from more than a single cloud vendor. However, this is not just an aggregation of various services from different vendors. In my experience, it requires a mandatory glue: a cloud-agnostic approach with interoperability across all providers. Below we’ll cover the challenges that can be faced with multi-cloud implementation and how to achieve the required interoperability in-house.

Cloud Expertise Gap While Migrating To Multi-Cloud

Extending the number of cloud environments usually means extending the skills, tools and efforts required to run these environments effectively. When you choose cloud offerings for your company, you should also consider the strengths and weaknesses of the available offerings and the way they correlate to the specific needs of the company.

Multi-cloud integration can involve tasks that are unfamiliar, even to experienced technical employees. So before starting the movement, your organization should be ready to make investments in order to develop the necessary skill sets internally or hire new professionals for the team who have a proven track record of multi-cloud expertise.

While growing your team's internal expertise, consider building a DevOps team with knowledge in container technology, cloud network interconnections, management of cloud-native microservices and decomposition of legacy applications, which I've found are key elements of multi-cloud implementation.

Management Complexity

Running several clouds requires not only skills but also human resources and time. Even seemingly simple things such as resource provisioning can become tangled if vendors use different methods or measures. That's because each of them has its own portals, APIs and processes that should be managed.

DevOps experts who can work across multiple cloud platforms are difficult to find. So if you need to make hires for the transition, your company should carefully check the track record of any candidates, and it's also helpful to test their skills working with automation tools and cloud orchestrators.

I recommend that companies reduce complexity by omitting cloud options that lead to significant reconfiguration, cloud-specific adaptation of applications or a mismatch of features. If the application requires different cloud-specific APIs or services on various clouds, the deployment or migration across platforms can create an immense amount of work each time. Therefore, the multi-cloud meaning is lost, and this can cause a waste of efficiency.

In order to avoid unnecessary complexity, I believe it is important to standardize your tools and processes, such as deployment and scalability. I also recommend avoiding any proprietary services that are not available at other cloud providers.

Security Concerns

Multiple cloud platforms naturally open a company up to a wider range of possible attacks and vulnerabilities. Thus, they require extra effort to gain effective security, governance, and compliance.

Nowadays, many cloud vendors implement modern digital asset protection strategies. But despite this fact, I've found that the main responsibility remains on the company itself to implement a safe multi-cloud strategy. Therefore, it's vital for your team to thoroughly discuss security requirements, how to avoid failures in protection and what the reaction to a security breach or data loss should be.

Cost Tracking

Cost flexibility can be one of the main benefits of a multi-cloud approach, but at the same time, cloud diversity can lead to extra risks and a loss of control over your budget. A lack of oversight, ROI analysis and tracking of cloud consumption can grow into a big waste.

In order to ensure multi-cloud efficiency, your organization can continuously monitor the cloud spends and tune or refine them depending on the projects at hand. It's also important to be proactive about predicting future consumption patterns.

In some cases, taming multi-cloud economics can prove to be the biggest challenge. Every platform has its own billing system, pricing model, resizing and payment options, so optimization and consolidation of the budget as a whole can become a total nightmare. That’s why it can be useful to have an internal team (such as a cloud cost analyst and engineers for tuning) that can consolidate the data and provide cost analysis both for specific applications and for the organization in general.

Redundancy Strategy

The importance of building a strategy for application and data redundancy, backups, disaster recovery and failover protection cannot be overstated, especially if the systems are located in an external data center and you can't fix the issues directly in case of an outage or other emergency.

In my experience, you can accomplish this by making provisions for automatic switching to the backup platform in case of failed operability or full nonavailability of the primary cloud. And to avoid data loss during the transfer, I find it important to think through the process of data synchronization between every instance or application replica throughout the implementation process.

Additionally, try to perform database updates between clouds with the lowest latency possible. Several times per year, your IT department can also check the failover process, emulate the errors (even if they seem impossible) and make sure that all environments work as intended in all cloud installations.

Compliance With Data Regulations

While building your multi-cloud infrastructure, it's important to consider the policies and regulations of your company, the country where you plan to locate workloads, and the provider itself.

Some local governments restrict data storing, in which case you can't place your workload outside the country. Also, some organizations, like financial or governmental institutions, can host their sensitive workloads only in highly secure private clouds. Consider these specifics before finalizing your multi-cloud strategy.

Summary

From my perspective, the key ingredient of a solid multi-cloud strategy is the abstraction. Organizations need to develop a governance layer that can provide this complete abstraction from the unique functionality of different cloud vendors and enable cloud-agnostic implementation without extra complexity.

In addition to combining standardized services from the required clouds, your team can identify the missing components between clouds to fully meet the company's needs. A deliberate strategy and specialized tools can ease the entry point, provide the expected level of interoperability and eliminate complicated processes throughout the project life cycle.

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