Enterprise IT infrastructure need not be a firewalled fortress anymore, thanks to the extensive adoption of SaaS platform which is backed by cloud computing technology. The digital revolution has helped enterprises deploy applications such as email, CRM, and collaboration beyond the four walls of their on-premise IT platforms.
 
Emergence Of Multi-Cloud Strategy

As more and more enterprises shift their workloads to cloud, there is a rapid adoption of multi-cloud services which has become a new normal for running workloads and applications by leveraging more than one cloud vendor. It has also extended its reach across on-site data center facilities, hosted infrastructures, and even private cloud environments.

One of the major reasons for proliferation of the multi-cloud adoption is rapidly evolving cloud and other technologies that are responsible for the changing face of several platforms including HRM, business intelligence and ERP to name a few. In the past these platforms hardly underwent makeover as the frequency of their upgrade was limited to just about once in a year.
 
Most of the CIOs of modern organizations are not able to precisely project the requirement of important resources including storage, compute, and network among others. This can be attributed to massive growth in types of workloads as well as their volumes. It is observed that a flexible and agile infrastructure such as cloud can only sustain unpredictability of resource requirements in the fast paced ecosystem while keeping applications always up and running.

There is a remarkable progress in terms of accessibility of data with extensive penetration of internet in a world where every second person seems to use a handheld device to browse sites, watch movies, or access data. Modern consumers are more demanding as far as information is concerned and the enterprises must find ways to satiate their expectations by providing services that are easily accessible.

Even though there are a great number of compelling advantages of multi-cloud adoption, one must tread cautiously on the path because the very nature of a multi-cloud environment is unpredictable. Unlike conventional approach of using a single cloud resource that involved a straightforward and structured operations based on approvals, a multi-cloud platform necessitates a multi-pronged strategy as discussed ahead.

Provide An Easy Access To Right Users

Unlike a typical on-site IT infrastructure that requires the IT personnel to understand and adapt to technologies before any other stakeholder, a multi-cloud approach opens the doors of technology to business side users before the IT team.
 
In a rapidly changing marketplace, business users must be provided with an abstraction layer by IT tams to facilitate use of IT related resources. The traditional approach of approval, customization and provisioning of the applications by IT teams is not relevant in a multi-cloud environment.
 
Understand Relevance Of Workloads

Multi-cloud strategy revolves around ability of the organization to exploit the cloud architecture to the fullest by clearly understanding the importance of workloads. This is because every leading cloud vendor offers solutions that facilitate workloads of different types.
 
Categorization of workloads is an essential step towards gaining clarity of workload distribution to different cloud vendors. Workloads may be classified under different heads such as peripheral, transactional, critical, and storage related applications.

By developing a clear map of existing as well as future workloads, IT team can project need for scalability of the resources. This will also facilitate mapping of workloads to various cloud utilities offered by different cloud hosting service providers.

Integrated Platform For Cloud Management

It is obvious that a multi-cloud adoption is eventually going to culminate in a highly complex and perplexing situation unless there is a provision for a comprehensive platform for management. You should prepare important stake holders from IT as well as departmental sides to handle complex challenges of governance, management, and standardization as the organization comes to terms with the multi-cloud ecosystem.

Cloud management platform must be able to empower all stake holders with seamless visibility in terms of all cloud resources. This will guarantee far better provisioning and management of cloud services for their optimum use.
 
Initiate Governance In Multi-Cloud

Mechanism of governance can never be optimized in the initial phases of multi-cloud adoption. However, one must at least make a beginning by looking at critical attributes of governance mechanism in a multi-cloud environment.
 
Make sure that the proposed governance mechanism covers norms for data, security and privacy by defining access rights and user types. Another vital aspect of governance mechanism should be the process of requisitioning cloud services including managed services, workflows, and processes for provisioning of cloud resources. In addition to these norms, cloud governance should focus on different cloud vendors in terms of their individual provisioning norms.
 
Takeaway

There is no substitute to adoption of a multi-cloud strategy if you need to empower your business with enhanced agility and improved choice of IT resources in the modern business environment. The journey to multi-cloud is riddled with number of road-blocks and therefore every individual enterprise must design a proper road map by addressing the steps mentioned in this post.

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