How to navigate multicloud management
With most businesses already relying on multiple cloud providers to meet their business objectives, we are now living in a multicloud world. But how can organizations navigate multiple cloud environments while meeting the demands of their most critical business priorities?
Research shows that most organizations haven’t been able to solve that problem yet. According to a study by the IBM Institute of Business Value, more than 60 percent of customers don’t have the tools and procedures to manage and operate in a complex multicloud environment. This can slow the progress of moving high priority workloads to use the cloud and can unintentionally introduce risk to an organization.
There are three major challenges that stand in the way:
Rapid application innovation. As developers discover new ways to develop and deploy applications, the number of software services is growing rapidly within organizations. Often, this growth exceeds the enterprise’s ability to effectively manage and control risk. This can be especially true when applications are spread across a wide range of software environments.
Data overload. Enterprises are embracing new technology around data and artificial intelligence (AI). The problem is that many organizations are still using traditional management methods to handle this data. This can leave many teams without the management capabilities to execute on their own data strategy. It’s also a challenge because improperly managed data can introduce significant risk for an organization.
Difficulty adopting DevOps and SRE best practices. If you work in development or IT, you have probably felt the pressure to embrace DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) best practices. This is certainly the right direction. The issue, however, is that these changes go beyond technology alone. Moving to a DevOps model can also require difficult cultural shifts with teams learning new ways of operating, and individuals taking on what was previously multiple roles.
Because of these key challenges, many businesses feel pressured to choose cloud management solutions that provide either speed or control, but not both. To succeed, enterprises will need to balance these two seemingly competing priorities and select a cloud management solution that will help them appropriately achieve both.
Overcoming the challenges: Three things to look for in a multicloud management solution
The good news is that there are strategies and solutions that can help steer your business in the right direction. A lot of the challenges can be mitigated by choosing the right multicloud management solution.
Here are three key features to look for:
Visibility. It’s critical to know where business application components are running. You must monitor the health of resources (such as deployments, pods, Helm releases) across Kubernetes environments, whether they are in public or private clouds, and in the appropriate business context.
Governance. As cloud-native environments proliferate across the enterprise, DevOps teams are tasked with ensuring that these environments are managed according to the enterprise’s governance and security policies. It’s advantageous to have a single dashboard that provides a consistent set of configuration and security policies, at service inception time. An increase in the number of cloud native components, such as Kubernetes clusters, should not mean an increase in the risk to a business, nor an increase in management costs.
Automation. Whether an enterprise application is a cloud-native, 12-factor application or a traditional application, enterprises need a consistent and flexible way to deploy and manage that application. The goal is to simplify the IT and application management, while increasing flexibility and cost savings with intelligent data analysis driven by predictive signals.
IBM Multicloud Manager: the award-winning solution for cloud management
IBM offers a multicloud management approach built for the enterprise that nurtures a high-performance, agile culture and embraces modern operational practices.
With built-in security and compliance, IBM Multicloud Manager helps teams organize complex applications running on any cloud, reducing management costs and reducing business risk through compliance standards. All of this provides the much-needed combination of speed and control that today’s progressive enterprises are searching to find.
Recently, IBM was recognized with the prestigious Gold Thomas Edison Award for the team’s innovation in creating this product. Companies can adopt this technology knowing that it is respected by experts across the industry.
To learn more about multicloud, and the broader enterprise cloud journey, take a look at the following assets:
Hybrid, multicloud lookbook
IBM hybrid, multicloud management
IBM Multicloud Manager website
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