How to avoid the problem of multi cloud management
Today, organizations are committed to collecting and retaining a large amount of data, and the economy of cloud computing makes it a compelling issue. Organizations in all industries hope to use cloud computing technology to meet the computing and data storage needs of enterprises. It seems that adopting a multi cloud strategy is the preferred strategy for most organizations: according to the survey of IDC, a research organization, 85% of companies have already adopted cloud computing.
Cloudiness has many advantages. Organizations adopting multi cloud can avoid cloud computing provider lock-in, improve its performance, and significantly reduce the possibility of DDoS attacks. However, they are faced with the problem of how to manage a multi cloud environment. The workload of enterprises is distributed in multiple cloud platforms, and each cloud platform has its own set of attributes and unique interfaces, which brings a lot of heavy work to IT managers. Judith Hurwitz, CEO of Hurwitz&Associates, concluded: "Multi cloud management is a very complex mixed environment, and enterprises need a single system for all its parts."
In order to avoid the potential pitfalls of managing a multi cloud environment, more and more enterprises choose hosting solutions, which is correct. Hosting solutions can provide powerful enterprise level data storage and management, and have the convenience of cloud computing. It provides customers with sufficient flexibility to select protocols and locations based on data types and preferences. One way to achieve this is cloud adjacent storage, where data is stored close to the data center of the major cloud computing provider. This proximity brings advantages such as high performance and low latency data access over traditional and new storage protocols.
It is important to match the workload to the appropriate vendor. First, the workload of the organization needs to be evaluated to determine which data should be stored on which cloud platform. For example, if the enterprise team needs to deploy Windows client applications, Windows Azure may be the most appropriate. At the same time, if the enterprise's workload involves big data analysis, Google Cloud or Bluemix may be the best solution. Then, IT managers need to consider the requirements of each workload, such as I/O, latency, scalability, and so on. Of course, enterprises must make trade-offs when choosing cloud computing providers, which is why it is so important to prioritize the needs of each workload. In order to perform this assessment effectively, the IT team needs to understand the datasets, servers, storage, and other components used by each workload. However, more and more enterprises realize that super large-scale cloud computing providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft lack some advanced functions required to support traditional enterprise databases and application workloads. Third party data storage providers now provide solutions to fill these gaps. IT teams should look for teams that can seamlessly integrate with multiple cloud platforms.
Ensure full privacy and compliance
Secondly, security is crucial. With the full implementation of GDPR regulations in Europe, IT teams have to reconsider their data management strategies to ensure that they meet the requirements. However, it is not easy to manage the data residing in the locally deployed data center and in the public and private clouds, especially for companies whose main workloads are changing. Therefore, the IT team needs to comprehensively assess how the data protection, backup/recovery and disaster recovery requirements of the application are met, especially for those applications that hold critical tasks and sensitive data.
IT leaders should not only ensure that access control is managed in each cloud platform environment, but also understand some questions: How does data sovereignty affect the organization? If sensitive information is stored or backed up to the cloud platform, which jurisdictions may these data exist in? And what are the potential legal or compliance issues that may apply?
In other words, data is subject to different laws and regulations in each region or country, so enterprise IT managers need to know the location of specific cloud storage data. For enterprises that want to ensure full privacy and compliance, they need to consider third-party data storage and management solutions that provide dedicated drives and resources, and ensure data destruction after deleting data.
Third, consider how to collect and track performance data in a multi cloud environment Hong Kong station cluster server 。 If you cannot track the performance of each workload and application in each cloud platform, you cannot troubleshoot and optimize performance when problems occur. Therefore, IT managers need to have adequate tools to track performance and adjust as needed to ensure optimal performance.
No one wants to work across multiple interfaces. Each interface has its own set of terms and protocols. In order to run business in a multi cloud environment, the IT team needs an entity, consistent and standardized control panel, and the organization's workload will be presented in the same way. Therefore, almost all multi cloud implementations use software defined storage. What enterprises should really look for in fully hosted storage services is a single software interface, and enterprise data can be displayed simultaneously in multiple cloud platforms. This means that there is no need for data movement between cloud platforms, and in the long run, it can save a lot of costs, because obtaining data will not incur export costs. In contrast, it will cost at least $20000 to move 1PB of data from the cloud platform of traditional cloud computing providers. Enterprises should not pay for acquiring their own data, nor should they pay for unused storage capacity.
By following the best practices outlined above, IT teams can ensure that they will not encounter storage management challenges in the future. Using the correct cloud platform adjacent multi cloud solution, the enterprise's IT team will no longer need to care about where the data actually resides, whether the data is stored in the data center, in the cloud, or across multiple cloud platforms. Users can interact with a consistent, vendor independent portal through which they can manage the entire storage infrastructure.
