Sometimes, talking to someone in another department or with a similar role at another organization can feel like speaking a different language. Despite shared responsibilities and ideas, some unexpected differences in terminology, processes, or perspectives can add complexity and require translation.

The same is true for multicloud environments. While leveraging multiple public clouds means that organizations are gathering resources from cloud vendors that offer similar solutions, some subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences can create real challenges when organizations try to unify and streamline their environments.

This is why multicloud management is so important. In this article, we’ll cover what multicloud management is, the benefits of managing your multicloud environment effectively, what to consider in a management strategy, and challenges businesses may encounter if they fail to take these proactive steps.

What is Multicloud Management?

Multicloud management is the practice of managing and optimizing an environment of multiple public clouds. This can include the tools, processes, and strategies used to manage data, applications, and infrastructure. The goal of multicloud management is to improve operations, visibility, and governance across all cloud platforms.

The biggest difference between multicloud and hybrid cloud management has to do with the type of infrastructure involved. While multicloud involves two or more public cloud services from various providers, hybrid cloud includes at least one public cloud environment and one private environment, either via on-premises data centers or a hosted private cloud.

The Role of Multicloud Management

Multicloud management plays an important role in the following domains:

• Governance: Ensuring that policies are consistent across the multicloud environment, each public cloud environment is compliant with key regulations, and resources are managed and provisioned appropriately.
• Cost Visibility: When spending across cloud service providers is visible and monitored, businesses can optimize costs, eliminate cloud waste, and ensure teams are sticking to established budgets.
• Orchestration: Creating and automating processes where possible, including application deployment, scaling, and management.
• Automation: Additional automation in multicloud management can include patching, provisioning, monitoring, and incident response. The more properly organizations set up automation, the less prone they are to human error.
• Security: Establishing identity and access management, threat detection, and data protection across all clouds for a consistent security posture. This also includes governance measures, which ensure compliance.

What Are the Benefits of a Multicloud Approach?

Taking a multicloud approach can be beneficial for several reasons, such as allowing businesses to avoid vendor lock-in, increase their resiliency, optimize workloads, meet compliance requirements, and drive further innovation.

Reducing Risk of Vendor Lock-In

When businesses rely on a single cloud provider, it’s easy to get stuck. Distributing workloads in a multicloud environment can reduce reliance on one vendor, allowing organizations to negotiate more with providers and seamlessly switch to a different provider if prices get too high.

Improving Disaster Recovery Capabilities

Organizations that are able to distribute their workloads also reduce risks associated with outages and disasters. If one cloud provider experiences a disruption, IT teams can architect workloads to fail over to another cloud environment in the event of a disruption—though this requires careful planning and tooling.

Tailoring Workloads to Clouds

Cloud providers have strengths in different areas. For example, some cloud providers may be better in a certain geographical region, offer specific database features that are of interest to an organization, or have AI/ML capabilities. Multicloud environments allow businesses to choose the cloud that’s right for each workload.

Meeting Requirements for Data Residency and Compliance

Each workload in your environment may have different compliance and/or data residency requirements. For example, a workload that includes personally identifiable financial or health information will need to abide by stricter rules compared to one that contains anonymized or non-critical data. A multicloud strategy allows organizations to allocate workloads to different environments based on their compliance and data residency requirements.

Improving Capacity to Innovate

When you draw from a larger pool of cloud providers, you open yourself up to more services and tools, creating more opportunities for innovation. Instead of relying on the resources from one vendor, businesses can choose which solutions are most appropriate to solve their current challenges or surpass competitors.

Top Challenges of Multicloud Management

While multicloud environments provide a wider playing field for organizations, they can also introduce new complexities. Businesses will need to work to unify and make sense of disparate cloud environments that seem to be speaking different languages.

Complexity Between Clouds

Unification can be hard in a multicloud setting because of the complex vocabulary differences between environments. For example, the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) may be written differently via Terraform for each environment, which can add a layer of complexity to each public cloud that’s included in the overall ecosystem. The lack of a mutual backbone means that working between environments can feel like you are constantly playing the role of a multilingual translator.

Data Silos and Integration Challenges

When data is held in one cloud, it can be hard to access from another, resulting in data silos. This can make it difficult to form meaningful insights due to a lack of comprehensive visibility. Integrating data can require a lot of time and expertise, but it’s necessary to avoid data inconsistencies or missed opportunities for deep analysis.

Security and Compliance Differences

Each cloud has its own security models, and while all major cloud providers tend to hold compliance certifications in major regulatory standards, they may vary from vendor to vendor. Each cloud provider also has its own identity and access management (IAM) system, which may result in additional effort to streamline security policies.

Cost Management Issues

Multicloud environments make it easier for organizations to negotiate with vendors and reduce the likelihood of lock-in, but they also provide more avenues where spending can go unchecked if it isn’t optimized. Understanding different pricing models, billing cycles, and discount structures is the key to optimizing costs in multicloud configurations.

Talent Gaps

Even the most skilled IT professionals can struggle with multicloud management if they haven’t had specialized experience in the exact combination of cloud providers your organization has decided to use. Organizations experiencing skills gaps can choose to invest in additional training, hire full-time specialists, or bring in third-party cloud computing experts for support.

Tools and Technologies for Multicloud Management

Effective multicloud management requires the right tools implemented in the right places. The following are some examples of tools organizations can use to optimize their multicloud environments.

Centralized Management Platforms (CMPs)

Centralized management platforms (CMPs) can help with resource provisioning, policy enforcement, basic monitoring, and inventory management across diverse cloud environments. Some examples of CMPs include VMware Aria, Nutanix Cloud Manager, and Morpheus. While not a traditional CMP, Azure Arc extends Azure’s management capabilities to resources in other clouds and on-premises environments, offering governance, policy, and security controls across multicloud and hybrid setups.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

By defining infrastructure in code, organizations can automate deployments, provide better version control, and create more consistent deployments in the multicloud environment. Some common examples of IaC tools include Terraform and Pulumi. Tools like Ansible can complement these by handling configuration after infrastructure is deployed.

Containerization and Orchestration

Containers and orchestration tools improve workload portability and allow applications to be delivered consistently, regardless of the cloud provider. Common tools used for containerization and orchestration include Docker and Kubernetes.

Network as a Service (NaaS) and Connectivity

Renting network services through NaaS providers can simplify connectivity management and allow for rapid scalability. Cloud exchanges work to bypass the public internet for more reliable, secure connections with lower latency. Software-defined interconnects (SDIs) create virtual private connections between an organization and multiple public clouds.

Security and Compliance Tools

Specialized tools can be used for cloud security posture management (CSPM), cloud workload protection, and identity and access management (IAM). Tools like Wiz, Lacework, and Orca Security can scan and monitor cloud environments for compliance deviations, security risks, and misconfigurations. Cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP) provide runtime protection for workloads in multicloud setups.

Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML)

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) tools can enable organizations to shift from a reactive to a proactive stance, detecting anomalies, automating complex tasks, and enhancing security and compliance measures with greater ease. While these can require additional steps to set up, they can pay off long-term by reducing errors, cutting down on manual time, increasing integrations, and uncovering valuable insights.

Do You Need a New Multicloud Management Strategy?

Does it feel like you have too much to manage in your multicloud environment, and your strategy might be lacking? Answer these questions to see whether it’s time to re-evaluate your current approach:

• Are your cloud bills hard to decipher?
• Is it difficult to attribute cloud spending to specific projects or teams?
• Do you feel like you’re missing out on cost-saving opportunities, or that you’re using more resources than you need?
• Are your teams spending significant amounts of time on manual tasks that you believe can be automated?
• Is there a lack of standardization across your multicloud environment?
• Are you experiencing frequent outages or errors?
• Are your teams struggling with inconsistent terminology across vendors?
• Are you unsure whether your security policies are applied consistently?
• Are your teams experiencing performance bottlenecks?
• Is your organization slow to implement new applications or services?
• Is it hard for your business to adapt quickly to changing market demands or business requirements?

If you selected at least a few of the items from above, it’s time to consider a new multicloud management strategy.

Essentials of a Strong Multicloud Management Approach

A comprehensive multicloud management approach will allow organizations to gain greater control, cost optimization, visibility, and connectivity in their multicloud environment, without compromises to compliance or security.

Centralized Visibility and Control

Regardless of the individual provider, you must be able to see all cloud resources from a single pane of glass. This centralized system will aggregate all metrics, logs, and traces. It should also offer a single strategy for IAM. This means the organization can form comprehensive insights and streamline user management without switching between tools.

Tools like Azure Arc help extend centralized policy, monitoring, and identity management from Azure to on-premises infrastructure and other clouds. This gives Azure-centric organizations a way to apply consistent governance across diverse environments.

Cost Optimization

A strong multicloud management system requires a strong budget. Your team should have detailed cost tracking and allocation that accurately attributes costs and pinpoints areas for further optimization. Teams should work to rightsize resources, eliminating idle or unused resources while creating automated rules to scale up and prevent performance issues when needed. Cost optimization starts with a strong foundation of established budgets, including forecasting that reduces the likelihood of spending surprises down the road.

Cloud Connectivity

To make multicloud operations seamless, businesses should optimize both cloud-to-cloud and user-to-cloud connections. Direct, private connections between clouds will improve performance and allow for secure data transfers between vendors. Technologies that can aid in this connectivity include NaaS, cloud exchanges, and SDI.

Businesses can leverage software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) for reliable, flexible connections. Additionally, they can layer secure access service edge (SASE) on top to enforce security policies and provide zero-trust access to all cloud environments.

Security and Compliance

Distributed environments present unique security challenges. A strong multicloud strategy should rise to the occasion with consistent policies, a centralized security information and event management (SIEM) system, and automated compliance checks. Security and governance policies should include details on how firewalls, data encryption, and intrusion detection/prevention systems will be used. They should also define how data will be accessed, stored, and transferred across clouds.

Workload Portability and Orchestration

To increase portability in a multicloud configuration, organizations can use container technologies, such as Docker, along with orchestration platforms, like Kubernetes, to package applications with dependencies. This makes applications easy to move across cloud environments.

Another way businesses can improve communication between specialized application blocks (microservices) across clouds is with a service mesh. A service mesh is a layer that operates like a network proxy for the traffic within an application. Cloud-agnostic tools can also help with greater communication and integration in a multicloud environment.

Expertise and Support

Even with an experienced in-house team, it’s likely you will require specialized knowledge and ongoing support to successfully navigate multicloud complexities. Your organization can invest in training and upskilling existing IT teams to learn more about how to manage multiple cloud platforms and cloud-native technologies. Choosing the right multicloud management provider is also important. This provider can help you align tools with business needs to craft a strategy that allows you to leverage tools from different vendors without drowning in cloud complexity.

How TierPoint Supports Multicloud Management

Multicloud doesn’t have to equal multitasking. TierPoint can help businesses unify their multicloud environment, reducing manual tasks and improving business efficiency so your IT teams can return to more strategic initiatives. Whether you’re looking to refine your current multicloud strategy, or you’re starting from scratch, we can support you in your next step.