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GETTING THE BEST OF THE CLOUD
Five ways to leverage multi-cloud services more effectively
Following steady and ongoing adoption of cloud across the business, organisations are now starting to optimise their cloud strategies. As maturity levels increase, organisations are moving from a cloud first approach, through cloud chaos to cloud smart. It has become clear that different types of cloud environment are required to support different workloads, and using multiple clouds is the way forward.
In fact, more than 77% of cloud users leverage more than one cloud, and the benefits are manifold. With the greater flexibility delivered by a multi-cloud strategy, organisations are able to avoid vendor lock-in, take advantage of the most competitive rates and utilise new features as become available, such as AI-based services. And there’s not just the hyperscalers to consider – thousands of specialist and local cloud providers also add value to the mix, enabling organisations to meet all their data sovereignty, security, regulatory, service and performance needs.
More clouds, more complexity
More clouds, however, means more complexity. As organisations expand their footprint, managing workloads across clouds can become increasingly time-consuming and require new skills, particularly with providers offering different toolsets. This has led to cloud chaos for some. It can also prove challenging to move workloads between environments – whether from on-premise to cloud, between cloud providers or from cloud to an on-premise environment. These migrations should be fast, seamless and without downtime, but this is not always the case.
It's not just legacy applications that can require relocating. Rather than developing apps in traditional environments and then refactoring, many organisations are now built natively in the cloud, but they may still need to be moved between providers.
Accelerating app development
With the constant race to launch new and innovative capabilities, the pace of app development never slows. To enable this velocity, app development is evolving with increased use of reusable modular components, meaning that organisations no longer have to write apps from scratch. They’re also increasingly developed within containers to drive flexibility. By developing apps in this way, organisations can maximise developer productivity, bring services to market more quickly and boost competitive advantage.
From cloud first through cloud chaos to cloud smart
By embracing a multi-cloud approach to modernising IT infrastructure and app development, organisation can take advantage of 42% faster time to release applications, 41% fewer IT hours spent on infrastructure and a 35% improvement in business productivity2.
So, how can organisations start to leverage these benefits? Here, we share five ways organisations can get cloud smart, simplify multi-cloud management, ensure their workloads are in the right environment and launch cloud-native apps faster:
improvement rate for the productivity of businesses
1.
Take advantage of a consistent platform
With a consistent platform, organisations can move between cloud providers and even on-premise clouds more swiftly and easily – whether for economic, regulatory, governance or security reasons.
Today, 4,500 public cloud providers build on VMware via the VMware Cloud Provider Program. From AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to local specialist cloud providers and on-premise datacenters, with VMware at the heart of the infrastructure, organisations can enjoy greater app portability, whether they’re moving their workloads across the datacenter or across the world.
2.
Find the right fit for workloads with readiness assessments
Organisations that carefully plan their multi-cloud strategy will have greater success. Before relocating workloads to the cloud or between providers, organisations need to understand their portfolio and map current and future requirements in order to make informed decisions.
It’s also a good idea to involve the right people in these decisions – with 50 percent of IT spend now outside the IT department, this might include stakeholders across HR, sales, finance or marketing. Application readiness assessments help organisations verify the most appropriate environment for each workload and identify the steps required, so organisations can ensure a seamless transition.
3.
Centralise toolsets with multi-cloud services
With siloed cloud services, IT teams may struggle with disparate operating models, APIs and management tools, which as well as impacting efficiency and requiring different skillsets, can make it hard to enforce security and governance controls.
With centralised multi-cloud services, however, organisations can standardise cloud infrastructure, operations and security capabilities on a single platform. This not only simplifies the deployment and migration of workloads across datacenters and cloud providers, but also helps optimise cloud spend.
4.
Assess your resources and inhouse skillsets
With IT skills shortages a key concern at the moment, organisations need to factor the available capabilities into their multi-cloud strategy. For example, which toolsets are employees used to using, and which can be easily introduced? Can analytics requirements be satisfied by cloud-based AI services if there’s a lack of internal resources? Can an ‘as-a-service’ approach fill in any gaps?
Organisations need to remember that it’s not just about the technology, but also communication, culture and teamwork. Only by balancing the right services, platforms, skills and people will they achieve their objectives.
5.
Empower developers with a modern platform
Building apps natively in the cloud enables teams to launch them faster, but they need a modern platform to deliver flexibility.
A multi-cloud Kubernetes platform enables developers to build and run apps consistently across any public cloud or on-premise Kubernetes cluster. With inbuilt capabilities, developers don't have to worry about backup, replication, failover or security. Instead, they can focus on innovating and launch new apps and features faster.
With the right platforms, tools and approach, organisations can get more from their cloud services, launch apps faster and optimise costs.