How can the complexities in multi-cloud environments be simplified

Janifha Evangeline | Saturday, 17 December 2022, 00:05 IST

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Today, as organizations have begun to shift their workloads to the cloud, both the hybrid, as well as distributed cloud environments, have become the new norm for most of them. In a new Harvard Business Review - Analytic Services survey while it was found that 85 per cent of the respondents stating their organizations implement at least 2 clouds - a quarter of them were implementing either 5 or more than five.

In order to realize cost savings with the cloud's on-demand consumption model several organizations have moved to the cloud to accelerate innovation, agility as well as growth. However, some find themselves grappling with the increasing complexity of multi-cloud operations as well as cloud costs which are spiraling out of control.

Since a few of the firms are not leveraging cloud services very consistently across siloed business units, they are under the risk of spending too much time as well as money on unwanted services, and as a result miss opportunities for optimizing performance & finding out the gaps in managing as well as securing internal & customer data.

One of the most important focuses for firms today is about managing the growing complexity as well as run costs of this hybrid, distributed cloud environment. Enterprises should either reduce the complexity of cloud operations or CloudOps for augmenting innovation and have to do it in order to keep pace with proliferating customer expectations. However, not all firms are managing multiple clouds either effectively or economically to achieve these goals.

Implementing a cultural shift in developing & modernizing applications for the cloud

Enterprises that are looking for new ways to manage several clouds are now understanding as well as discovering the importance of engineering-led operations and how it renders advantages that refine their cloud-workload management strategies.

Managing multi-cloud complexities needs new approaches to IT operations which would help in enhancing automation & simplification. It requires the implementation development, security & operations, and site reliability engineering practices into how you design, build, deploy as well as operate your applications & workloads for the cloud. It requires having the right skills and policies in place and implementing a cultural shift in how you develop and modernize applications for the cloud.

Firms would find it highly challenging for capturing all the advantages they anticipate from their cloud investments without any consistent means of finding out where, when & how to run their cloud workloads,

Utilizing CloudOps for Coordinated Cloud Management

While managing several public as well as internal cloud environments, the decision-making has to balance technology with business strategy - whether the aim is for supporting data storage & analytics, employee communications & productivity, AI/ML automation, CRM, or any other outcome.

The firms that are participating in the survey are yet to completely adopt CloudOps. Say they are either working with an aim to overcome such cloud-management challenges or are hiring for the skills they require, enforcing standards as well as practices as they upgrade, optimize cloud usage, enhance security & govern data consistently. When asked to choose from a list of challenges they face in managing their clouds, fifty-one percent reported that they are having difficulty in keeping up with the technology skills/talent required, the most-cited answer.

When enterprises can coordinate their cloud management & free up their Information Technology resources & talent from dealing with the everyday challenges of managing cloud complexity, they can augment digital transformation via an increased focus on automation, Artificial Intelligence, data analytics & new insights.

Leveraging FinOps for Cloud Cost Management

For most firms, the cornerstone of innovation is cloud computing in order to drive business agility as well as high-velocity decision-making for keeping pace with changing customer demands and expectations & market trends. However, without the right checks & balances, cloud investments can become a runaway train quickly.

In order to address these challenges, more than 50 per cent of the respondents HBR-AS surveyed state their firms have coordinated their approaches to FinOps intending to streamline their spending & usage.

Establishing a FinOps practice within a firm encourages a cross-functional collaboration of technology, operations as well as finance teams to increase financial accountability on cloud investments. The aim of this collaboration is to enhance processes, decrease business risks, & provide offerings faster while ensuring the costs are reduced and it helps in boosting business performance.

For a few companies, establishing a FinOps practice would not only require a culture change but also shifting technology leadership's conventional responsibility to make all buying decisions, rather than sharing investment decisions to make sure there is coordination on business strategy. It also requires developers for considering more cost-related matters, such as the impact a product enhancement or modification would have on cloud investment.

The way ahead

As cloud consumption models become more and more complex & data-rich, the opportunities for FinOps to improve the cloud consumption quality, as well as the overall business performance, will only increase and once it establishes a FinOps center of excellence, the firm can make more balanced cloud investments & strengthen the business by strategically reallocating cloud spend in a fast-paced digital world.

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