Important fundamentals of a successful Multi-Cloud Environment

A multi-cloud world is quickly becoming the new normal for

many enterprises. But embarking on a cloud journey and

managing cloud-based services across multiple providers

can seem overwhelming.

Even the term multi-cloud can be confusing. Multi-cloud is not

the same as hybrid cloud. The technical definition of a hybrid

cloud is an environment that includes traditional data centers

with physical servers, a private cloud with virtualized servers as

well a public cloud provisioned by service providers. Quite

often, multi-cloud simply means that an organization uses

multiple public clouds from many vendors to deliver its IT

services. In other words, organizations can have a multi-cloud

without having a hybrid cloud, or they can have a multi-cloud

as part of a hybrid cloud.

When an organization’s users take the initiative to adopt

infrastructure and solutions from different cloud vendors,

challenges emerge. Each new cloud service comes with

its own tools that can increase complexity. Multi-cloud

environments require new management solutions to optimize

performance, control costs, and secure complicated mixes of

applications and environments, regardless of whether they

are inside the data center or in the cloud.

Today, IT users have a choice. Corporate IT departments

know that if they don’t react, they may find themselves

irrelevant. As a result, they are moving away from the capital

investment model of IT—in which standing up a data center

was essential—to assembling a catalog of IT services available

from CSPs. In this environment, how can IT control the use

of services by different internal groups to avoid unexpected

expenses and potential risks?

Understanding cloud environments and making decisions

about multi-cloud management can be complex. Questions

arise, such as how organizations need to change in this

multi-cloud world. Working with enterprise customers,

IBM has identified ten key pain points and related best

practices that help organizations successfully navigate.