How Not to Sabotage Your Multi-Cloud Strategy

The immense pressure for enterprises to deliver new applications and insights that exploit new business opportunities has been a driving force for digital transformation. This, in turn, has led IT leaders to embrace a multi-cloud strategy—whether that’s deploying a combination of cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure and Google, or extending private data centers to the public cloud—to achieve greater agility, optimized performance and cost savings resulting from deploying workloads across multiple cloud platforms.

However, maintaining multiple cloud platforms and services adds complexity and even confusion to enterprise IT environments already crowded with a range of technologies, applications and processes. While a recent Forrester study shows that enterprises are increasing investments in using multi-cloud strategies for business-critical applications and workloads, the majority of these enterprises also report that they experienced issues with deploying and using multi-cloud environments.

The difficulty in managing IT environments made more complex by multiple cloud services involves three major issues: ignoring the importance of cultural transformation, not addressing the widening skill set gap and implementing a DIY approach to cloud management.

Here are three ways to deal with these challenges, so you don’t end up sabotaging your multi-cloud strategy.

The cultural transformation required to support digital transformation and to fully take advantage of multi-cloud’s power is more than shifting the organizational mindset from capex to opex. It’s also more than picking one or a combination of the big three cloud providers and simply saying, “Let’s do this.” It requires building trust and breaking down the silos of technology knowledge—whether vendor, legacy or emerging technologies—across disparate IT teams to achieve the business goal of speedier application development and faster time to market.

Specifically, this culture change requires better collaboration between teams and arming central IT with up-to-date processes and management platforms that are focused less on managing infrastructures and more on achieving a balance between visibility and resource control, the linchpin for IT, and creativity, the true north for developers. It will have parameters in place for provisioning resources while helping developers get the resources they need—compute, storage, network services and more—as quickly as possible.