Need to strategize and address the growing Multi-Cloud Networking Challenges

To keep pace with growing user expectations around digital experiences while honouring data privacy and residency regulations, more and more applications are being decomposed and distributed across different cloud platforms. For NetOps and DevOps practitioners, this creates a need for simplifying app-to-app networking across multiple clouds as a foundation for distributing applications.

Over 90% of enterprises are embracing a multi-cloud strategy. Simply put, a multi-cloud approach offers significant advantages to organizations seeking to optimize the Three Cs of Cloud: Cost, Capabilities and Compliance. Still, with all the advantages to be gained with a multi-cloud approach, executives should be aware of the downsides.

It is time to address multi-cloud networking and distributed cloud services that can seamlessly integrate into your existing infrastructure and provide immediate value-add for existing and new applications to deliver, secure, and interconnect apps in multiple clouds without being an expert in each one by leveraging automation to build app-to-app networking and security policies across multiple clouds.

The challenge in multi-cloud adoption is managing complexity, the more cloud environments your organization uses, the more complex the management task becomes. The problem lies in the diversity among cloud vendors. Each public cloud vendor has its own portal, its own APIs, and its own unique processes for managing its environment. Because there is no standardization across public cloud vendors, multiplying vendors means multiplying the management burden.

However, the advantage is from the side of cost control. Multi-cloud is the ability to provide developers and database administrators with a “self-service” experience, that is, the ability to quickly deploy their applications in their cloud environment of choice. Unfortunately, this can also lead to sprawl when an organization loses track of where its applications are hosted or when applications are not being run efficiently. You must have undoubtedly heard the horror stories about organizations unexpectedly racking up thousands and thousands of dollars in cloud costs.

Even the billing process itself can become unwieldy when enterprises use multiple clouds, with each cloud vendor using different billing systems and employing a variety of pricing, fee and infrastructure sizing models. Secondly, as enterprises migrate workloads from legacy platforms to the cloud or attempt to move applications or data among cloud platforms, the frustrating interoperability of platforms becomes apparent.

Finally, the IT teams must deal with siloed vendor tools, a lack of consolidated monitoring across cloud environments, and other interoperability challenges that multiply the administrative burden and drive-up cloud costs.

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, President & CEO, VARINDIA