Most companies are in some stage of moving from on-premises applications, services, and data to the cloud. Whether you have fully moved to the cloud, have just begun the journey, or are somewhere in between, someone will ask you if you have adopted a “multi-cloud” strategy. Before answering that question, consider these things:
- Are you primarily using only one cloud provider, such as Microsoft, AWS, or Google?
- Have you taken advantage of multiple providers? You might be using some services from one provider and services from another as each one is better suited for specific purposes.
There are many reasons that a multi-cloud strategy may make sense for a company, such as differences in capability, cost, or performance. Also, it might be desirable not to have all “eggs in one basket” for reliability or resilience. But before embarking on a multi-cloud journey, it is important to know some of the pain points involved so that you can plan your strategy accordingly.
Complexity
Cloud frameworks can be complicated enough individually, but when you mix and match services from multiple frameworks, this can result in exponentially greater levels of complexity.
- Lack of Standardization: Each of the major cloud providers has taken different approaches to similar problems, resulting in varied specifications from one provider to another. The tools, APIs, and even the technical terms are different, requiring operators to learn multiple ways to do the same thing.
- Interconnectivity: When most of a company’s services were all housed internally, getting each of the systems to speak to each other and integrate data was more straightforward. If all the new services live on a single cloud provider, that provider may facilitate the integration, but as soon as you have applications and services that exist on completely different frameworks, then you must learn how to pass information seamlessly from one cloud to another.
- Updates: One of the great features of cloud systems is that they can be constantly evolving, with new capabilities and power introduced yearly, quarterly, or even monthly. Often, though, this results in changes to the user interface, APIs, and security model. That can be challenging even with a single cloud provider but is much more difficult to keep up with, the more clouds you work with.
Security
Staying one step ahead of the bad guys is a constant battle in any environment. Cloud infrastructure has its own set of challenges. Multi-cloud adds another layer of complexity to providing security.
- Configuration: Many cloud systems have default security settings that are not optimal. If your team is not fully trained in the configurations that are specific to each cloud provider, then vulnerabilities can be overlooked.
- User Access: Each cloud provider uses different technology to control access to resources. When you are utilizing multiple clouds, you not only have to handle the user access differently from system to system, but you also have the added challenge of keeping the multiple systems all up to date when users’ needs or roles change. This can be alleviated by using a central framework that allows you to control all user access from one point. But this framework must be able to control and interoperate with the various cloud providers.
- Responsibility: Some security considerations are the responsibility of your company, and some are dependent on the cloud provider. Who is responsible for what varies from one cloud provider to another? You can’t make assumptions about how this is being handled.
- Increased Attack Surface: The more spread out your infrastructure is across multiple cloud providers, the greater the opportunity for hackers to find a weak spot.
Closing Thoughts
As you can see, a multi-cloud approach brings a host of other considerations. A smaller company, particularly one with a lean IT organization, might be hard-pressed to maintain adequate knowledge necessary to manage multiple cloud providers.
If multi-cloud makes enough sense for other reasons, such as financial benefits, then it might be necessary to engage with third-party MSPs (managed service providers) to handle the various services or at least those for which you don’t have in-house expertise.
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