Multicloud adoption and shared responsibility: how can an organization manage?

Your organization has servers that need to be replaced, software that’s at the end of support life, and no capital budget to upgrade. What can you do? Using a cloud provider is an option, but your organization doesn’t have expertise in performing migrations and how do you choose which provider is best for your workloads?

The decision to convert capital expenses of upgrading and maintaining systems and software to an operating expense of the pay-as-you go environment the public cloud offers seems to make the decision simple, but what else must be considered?

When determining a cloud direction, it’s important to evaluate your workloads and determine a proper migration path to the cloud. Selection of a cloud provider should take into account your application and data security, compliance and regulatory requirements. Remember that cloud providers such as Microsoft^®, Amazon^®, Google^®, Oracle^®, etc. provide consumption-based services, so it’s not necessary to choose only one provider.

Many organizations are taking a multicloud approach to decrease the exposure to vendor lock-in when designing an architecture, using a mixture of on-premises, private virtualization, and more than one public cloud provider (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, etc.) depending on application and data requirements.

Once your organization has chosen a multicloud path, how will it be monitored, managed and maintained? How will you secure your network and application architecture? How will you protect your data and equally as important, and how will you manage and maintain your multicloud environment?

No matter what public cloud provider is chosen, each has clear lines of responsibility for data and applications. These lines maintain that responsibility falls on the organization. Some providers are in the business to supply and not support users, at least not proactively. The user, not the public cloud providers, is responsible for supporting their environment. Hiring and retaining talent with multicloud skills is critical but very challenging for organizations. What are your options?

Strategic partners: managed service providers (MSPs)

To take full advantage of a multicloud strategy, it’s important to find a partner who can assist in the guidance to discover, analyze, migrate and support these services on an on-going basis. Comprehensive managed service providers will assist in creating the roadmap for migration to the best cloud environment suited for workloads, and then provide ongoing support that includes monitoring, updating, securing data, compliance and security management, and periodic cost analysis comparing services across the multiple cloud vendors.

A comprehensive managed service provider can work with an organization on the journey to the cloud with recommendations and expertise that may not be within an organization. They can provide ongoing support, best practices, and ‘know how’ without your organization increasing internal resources. The managed services provider becomes an extension of your IT team.

When choosing a comprehensive managed service provider, verify their capabilities and discuss the processes to secure your applications and data. After people, data is the most important resource to an organization. Make sure that you’re working with a managed services organization that maintains that perspective. This will allow you to move to a multicloud environment with confidence.

More Information

Contact our multicloud professionals today for more information and guidance on how to start your multicloud journey.