Companies have been moving data, applications, and development work to the cloud in greater numbers for the past several years — a trend that has seen a significant boost since the coronavirus pandemic triggered a rise in remote work and ecommerce activities.
More than ever, organizations are launching or expanding multi-cloud strategies as they advance their digital transformations and deal with the new challenges wrought by the global health crisis and its impact on business processes. Recent IDG research noted that cloud platforms are playing a key role in helping organizations respond to the crisis, because they provide operational resiliency and needed work-from-home tools.
IDG’s survey of 551 IT decision makers found that more than half use multiple public cloud services today and 21 percent said they use three or more cloud services.
Operating and managing an environment supported by multiple cloud providers and services poses distinct challenges, however. IT and business leaders need to address these hurdles if they are to help their organizations succeed in a multi-cloud world.
Not all cloud services are equal when it comes to supporting particular applications, workloads, and business processes. Organizations on multi-cloud journeys must put in the effort to figure out which services are best for specific tasks.
“The first main challenge was around the identification, selection, and deployment of the right services in each cloud environment,” says
Samantha Liscio, CIO of the Workplace Safety & Insurance Board of Canada (WSIB), an agency that provides support and insurance for workers injured on the job.
Since late 2017, WSIB has been shifting away from its legacy IT infrastructure toward the cloud. In partnership with IT consulting and services provider Accenture, it designed and executed a transformation program that includes cloud services, a new, cloud-ready operating model, and greater emphasis on resilient digital services.
Today, WSIB operates a multi-cloud environment involving a mix of integrated public cloud offerings and its own private cloud. Among the cloud providers it relies on are ServiceNow, Microsoft Azure, and WSIB’s private cloud hosting provider. The Organization is using cloud services for a variety of applications, including employer financial reconciliation, identity management, a digital portal for employee claims information, and claims processing.
“One of the difficult decisions WSIB needed to make was choosing the fit-for-purpose cloud services from a broad catalog of services offered by the leading cloud vendors and understanding how they integrate into WSIB’s broader hybrid cloud architecture,” Liscio says.
In the development of the overall infrastructure strategy, Accenture helped WSIB overcome the challenge by defining the cloud service selection criteria and cloud deployment decision framework. WSIB then used this to make important strategic choices, Liscio says.
In many cases, multi-cloud environments are replacing proven, cohesive legacy IT infrastructures that have been in place for years. To make the transition successful, and to ensure workflows aren’t disrupted, companies must make the various cloud services fit together as if in a puzzle.
“The difficulty with multi-cloud management is in the ability to integrate with and operate multiple diverse technology solutions, standards, and service tiers [offered by the cloud vendors], from a single place — what is often referred to as a single pane of glass,” Liscio says.
The infrastructure strategy WSIB created defined a set of critical cloud management and operations capabilities, such as orchestration and automation, metering and billing, and predictive operations. This has enabled the Organization to deploy those capabilities in its operations, either directly or with the help of cloud providers.
