An Opinion piece on De-risking multi-cloud IT environments by Mohammad Wahba, Director, Systems Engineering – Middle East at Nutanix
Modern day organizations are confronted with the challenge of transitioning from legacy IT systems to the new era of multi-cloud environments. These come with obvious results that completely transform the business and deliver competitive advantages, placing them in leadership positions.
A multi-cloud strategy offers a range of valuable business benefits including flexibility, scalability, increased efficiencies, lowered costs and access to cutting-edge technologies. But with great power comes great responsibility (and risk). Enterprises navigating these dynamic environments need an approach that avoids the potential pitfalls associated with multiple clouds. Here’s how to navigate the multi-cloud world with confidence:
Identifying Multi-cloud Challenges:
- Security: Segregated services across multiple clouds increase the attack surface which expose high threats of ransomware and various malicious vulnerabilities.
- Vendor Lock-in: Over-reliance on a single vendor/ cloud provider can limit flexibility and inflate costs.
- Data Residency and Compliance: Regulations governing data storage and privacy vary by region.
- Integration Complexity: Managing and integrating applications across multiple cloud platforms can be challenging.
- Skills shortage: Acquiring high caliber talent and skills to run multi-cloud environments remains a challenge in the IT market.
Based on Nutanix’s latest Enterprise Cloud Index 2024 research published in March this year, the main findings were:
- 90% of ECI respondents are taking a “cloud smart” approach to their infrastructure strategy – leveraging the best environment (e.g., data center, public cloud, edge) for each of their applications. It is no wonder that hybrid and multi-cloud environments have become the de facto infrastructure standard
- Over 80% of organizations believe hybrid IT environments are most beneficial to their ability to manage applications and data
- 78% of organizations are planning to invest more in security strategies for multi-cloud
- 37% indicated that their AI based applications require the modernization that multicloud offerings can grant them, if all challenges are governed with a standard cloud operating model
De-risking the Multi-cloud Strategy:
By adopting a proactive risk mitigation approach, organizations can harness the full potential of the multi-cloud world while minimizing potential disruptions. Remember, the journey to a secure multi-cloud environment is a continuous process, requiring ongoing adaptation and governance. De-risking involves the following steps:
- Build the standard cloud operating model: Invest in building a cloud operating model that caters for international hyper-scalers, as well as local cloud providers, while being able to operate on-prem environments.
- Embrace portability: Choose a cloud operating model that relies on open standards and easy data migration capabilities. This reduces vendor lock-in and simplifies future cloud transitions.
- Cloud cost management: Implement FinOps enabled cost optimization and governance model to automate cloud expenditure visibility, resource usage and identify opportunities for cost savings across providers.
- Multi-cloud disaster recovery (DR): Develop a comprehensive automated DR runbook that accounts for outages or disruptions in any of your cloud environments while assuring seamless business continuity.
- Invest in the right expertise: Upskill your IT team and consider partnering with cloud security specialists.
The Nutanix Multi-Cloud Risk Mitigation Practice
Nutanix focuses on helping customers with a cloud experience that assures modernization, simplicity, data centricity and portability.
Its cloud platform is built with the secret sauce of its hyper-converged infrastructure technologies, based on AI/ Big Data distributed architecture and offers customers the following:
- A consistent and unified single platform
- AI based innovation to deliver the best experience for each hosted application/ data
- 53% more efficient multi-cloud management and orchestration
- 60% faster time-to-value, utilizing various cloud options without service disruption
- E2E best-in-class security, governance and compliance for apps/ data
- Unmatched ease of use that grants faster skillset and talent acquisition
- Portability of licenses and workloads between cloud options or on-prem assuring no vendor/cloud lock-in
