Multicloud Infrastructure for the Future of Work
COVID-19 has driven a fundamental shift in technology architecture, pressing many organizations to accelerate cloud migration. With the future of work on fast forward, infrastructure suddenly holds new potential for competitive advantage.
As IT departments scrambled to virtualize the global workforce earlier this year, stress on existing infrastructure forced many organizations to lift and shift to the cloud quickly, with speed prioritized over optimization. At the same time, infrastructure risks such as limited access to on-premise systems and the vulnerability of tightly interlocked business and technology architectures took on new urgency.
As the dust settles on cloud decisions made over the past year, revisiting the technology backbone now can help businesses plan and modernize more thoughtfully to optimize processes, mitigate risk, and manage complexity. Picking up from the compressed COVID-19 timeline, many organizations are now focused on planning, fine-tuning, and deploying in three key areas: multicloud solutions for heterogeneous infrastructures, federated security, and DevOps. Organizations that move quickly have an opportunity to approach infrastructure as a competitive edge and rethink how technology enables work, the workforce, and the workplace to operate virtually and at peak performance.
With multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies now the norm, managing cloud complexity is ready for the next frontier: configuring tools, software, and technology for full-stack, multicloud solutions that focus on access, network management, operations, and end-point complexity. These solutions include capabilities such as identity and access management, network monitoring, metadata management, and AI for IT operations (AIOps) to manage workforce systems and platforms. Effective multicloud solutions provide orchestration to manage data, resources, and workflow and to ensure efficient data flow across the full solution architecture, from storage and databases to platforms and security.
Primary considerations for multicloud solutions include building common data services, managing heterogeneous infrastructures, resolving endpoint complexity, and embracing new methodologies in IT operations, including AIOps. Deployed successfully, multicloud solutions can help reduce redundancy and enable data compatibility, API connectivity, and enhanced governance. They can also help organizations establish flexible consumption models with improved cost governance and enable predictive monitoring.
Increased use of home internet and personal mobile devices has magnified the security risks and requirements for trusted access. The shift in how and where people work has reinforced the need for federated security strategies that have proven successful for driving situational awareness and for managing distributed, heterogeneous infrastructure security across tiers. Federated security models can be used to reach every infrastructure tier, device, or process and close security gaps with network segmentation. The framework enables organizations to deploy, integrate, and manage multiple cloud computing services while defining and implementing federated security protocols across the application, network and system layers, and the cloud security center.
Strong federated security for multicloud architecture should focus on proactive defense monitoring (early warning, command, and control), secure supply chain, and managing access-point attacks to defend against malware, advanced persistent threats, and network intrusions across infrastructure tiers, data storage, trusted platforms, websites, and operating systems. Federated security can also be used to enable dynamic threat information sharing. For example, the U.S.
