A migration to the cloud is rarely a neat shift from on-premises, legacy solutions to a dream partnership with a single cloud provider. In most situations, enterprises are employing a multi-cloud approach in order to meet their business needs.
This often occurs because the enterprise appreciates the cost savings and innovative potential of a public cloud provider, but the company also values the security and control of the private cloud environment. Even among public cloud providers, there may be some workloads that function better on one platform, while others are more appropriate for a different provider.
Enterprises often choose the multi-cloud path because it helps avoid having a single point of failure and may help them maximize efficiencies. The multi-cloud route also keeps the organization from experiencing vendor lock-in, where they are vulnerable to price increases and changes in the level of service, or they may be left to scramble if the provider decides to no longer offer that particular cloud solution or goes out of business.
While multi-cloud addresses these specific concerns, it also introduces some complexity that IT professionals must navigate. The innovative pace of public cloud providers can be impressively fast, but it can leave enterprise IT teams struggling to keep up with what technologies are available.
There are some strategies that enterprises using multi-cloud can adopt to ease the learning curve and keep up-to-date on changes:
Lunch and Learn: Organizations that embrace a multi-cloud approach often benefit from scheduling regular, short training sessions where teams share new capabilities and features. This strategy also serves to soften the boundaries between teams working on different cloud platforms and increases teams’ communication and collaboration efforts.
Managed Services: In some situations, it makes sense to outsource the management of cloud platforms to a third-party provider. These relationships help the enterprise to receive only the information about service updates that relate to their business needs. The managed services provider will have insight into the enterprise needs and which innovations are relevant to their business objectives.
It’s also important to note that, when making cloud provider decisions, it makes sense to address them on an application basis. A third-party managed service provider can help your enterprise determine the ideal environment for each workload and how it will impact performance, cost, and other variables.
If you’re considering how to ease the complexity of your multi-cloud environment, contact us at Diversified Technology Group. We can help you determine the best mix of public and private cloud to support your business processes within your budget.