When you are working with multi-cloud providers, this is usually a long-term venture and so you need to have a strategy in place that will work over the long-term and will include high-stakes goals. There are many common pitfalls that you can make the mistake of running into and so to help you navigate your way around them, we are talking you through how to shape a multi-cloud strategy and how to avoid major mistakes. Carry on reading to find out more.
There are lots of IT initiatives out there and this can produce a lot of unrealistic multi-cloud expectations. If your business is making a big move to cloud, then you may first be better mastering just one cloud and then moving on to use multiple cloud providers. A lot of organisations can overestimate their internal expertise and while they may be used to using multiple SaaS apps, this does not then automatically make them qualified to manage multiple laaS environments across many platforms. Before getting multi-cloud, business employees need to know how to use that platform, the processes and the tools that are optimised to build and operate service across multiple cloud environments. If you are having problems with this on a single-cloud, then simply moving to a multi-cloud is not always the simple solution as you need to release automation and software. Try and fix these issues first before moving to a multi-cloud system.
When you have a multi-cloud strategy, this essentially just means that you will have more clouds available to use giving you extra flexibility, resource optimisation and scalability. However, this will also be a lot more for your team to manage and so you should make sure that you have planned for this. You need to ensure that the design and operations of your multi-cloud strategy are right and never assume that you will be able to run your workloads completely seamlessly with a cloud provider. UKCloud products are a market authority in the provision of assured laaS cloud solutions and can offer this design complexity with your strategy. This includes UKCloud for VMware, UKCloud for Microsoft Azure and Cloud GPU just to name a few. You need to have architectural complexities in place that should be carefully designed for the current multi-cloud implementations to be a success. Just a few of these possible complexities could be security, health monitoring, load balancing and staff skill levels.
Many people tend to automatically assume that when they implement a multi-cloud strategy, that their costs will come down. While it will definitely give you more flexibility and choice, costs coming down is no guarantee. It should not be underestimated how complex it can be to manage multiple clouds and they require continuous upkeep with ongoing management and maintenance. You need to work out your costings as part of your long-term strategy, and this can then lead to great cost advantages.
Another mistake that you need to avoid when implementing a multi-cloud strategy is overestimating the security benefit. Organisations can not yet simply assume standardisation across these platforms and while some layers of security will be the responsibility of the cloud vendor, not all will be and there will still be some aspects that you are responsible for.
Implement your multi-cloud strategy today, keeping in mind these mistakes that are often made, so you do not fall into the same pitfalls.