Enterprises are moving to hybrid and multi-cloud environments, counting on a variety of benefits including scalability, cost reduction, and improved agility. While these are just a few of the potential advantages of migrating to the cloud, there’s also an expectation of less complexity.

Moving workloads to the cloud from legacy, on-site systems can deliver a comparable experience in many ways, but it can be challenging for IT to achieve a self-service, on-demand infrastructure shortly after migration. As IT goes on to shift workloads to multiple public clouds, both complexity and cost can increase.

Traditionally, enterprises have had an organized workflow for developers, with a private infrastructure featuring a reliable command and control center. The process of approval and development were completed with a careful eye on cost, compliance and security. While the process of development and deployment was not known for speed, it was familiar and comfortable.

In today’s hybrid and multi-cloud settings, each public cloud is routinely used, but each provider presents a proprietary tool for maximizing the value of its own platform. In addition, enterprise IT is increasingly using a mixture of deployment models.

With no centralized IT management approach, plus a growing workload adding pressure to a shrinking operations budget, the environment becomes more complicated. IT departments need a way to empower developers, all while offering tools that control for cost, compliance and security.

There are three key requirements for a unified hybrid or multi-cloud management solution:

• Self-service infrastructure
• Developers empowered for quick development and deployment
• Improved visibility and control into development costs

One approach to this challenge is to create an infrastructure platform that serves as a collection of individual cloud infrastructures. While this solves some aspects of the challenge, the failure to unify and simplify the management of costs, compliance and security concerns keep it from being a total solution.

Another option is to deliver management tools through a cloud management platform, which is good for automating solutions that are cloud-native, but there are a few limitations:

• This is ideal for cloud-native applications, not applications migrated from a legacy system.
• Any given platform may not get universal buy-in from the enterprise, resulting in different staff members using different tools.
• The focus is on unifying infrastructures, rather than a management focus on controlling cost, compliance and security.

There are some new solutions emerging that offer comprehensive multi-cloud management of data and applications across multiple infrastructures. Contact usat eXemplify to discuss the best strategies for managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments.