Meeting the Challenge of Managing a Multi-Cloud Environment

By Tim Malfara, Vice President of Hybrid IT and Cloud Services, Anexinet

Without a doubt, the most significant challenge when it comes to managing a multi-cloud environment is its governance and compliance. Each cloud platform comes equipped with its own unique set of management and reporting tools. To complicate matters even further, they all enable a significant amount of logging data to be collected. This can make it challenging to aggregate and understand the big picture, requiring that an organization sift through the information to determine the proper course of action. While automation can offer some degree of help, it is critical that organizations fully understand their own workloads and requirements in order to measure and act on the proper metrics because there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. 

And when it comes to selecting a multi-cloud management tool, ease of use should be a primary requirement. The shorter the learning curve (for any tool), the quicker the adoption. A close-second requirement would be the rate at which new services are supported. 

Organizations that adopt, establish, and enact a Cloud Center of Excellence are best positioned to handle this challenge described above. For those who might be unfamiliar, a Cloud Center of Excellence is a cross-functional team whose responsibilities include Strategy, Governance, and Oversight. Further, this team needs to be empowered to blend the business, financial and technical needs of the organization. The tools and operational components should be considered from the perspective of how they meet an organization’s needs.

A company of any size—from a small business to a global corporation—that is keen on pursuing a multi-cloud approach will encounter problems—not only in configuration and management but also when it comes to finding and retaining employees who possess the appropriate skill sets. While most core concepts are similar across cloud providers, possessing deeper knowledge and experience in order to understand how each service links together, is the key to success. Establishing and fostering a Cloud Center of Excellence can help alleviate some of these potential problems at your organization.

About the Author

As Vice President of Hybrid IT & Cloud Services for Anexinet, Tim Malfara drives Hybrid IT innovation and enables customers to embrace next-gen technologies—whether in the cloud, on-premises, or both. Prior to this, Tim served as Managing Director of Infrastructure Solutions where he led the delivery of Infrastructure consulting services across five practice areas: virtualization, end-user computing, storage, Microsoft and networking.