3 Multi-Cloud Management Challenges & How to Overcome Them

Here are three multi-cloud management challenges impacting IT teams today, and how they can overcome them.

We've long talked about how the cloud is the future. But with the vast majority of corporate data now stored in the cloud, it's clear that most businesses now realize this is a must-have in today's increasingly demanding and agile business environment. 

The cloud has been the backbone of the remote restructuring of the workplace over the last two years, enabling organizations to access data flows and critical workloads no matter where their employees are stationed. So much so that there's been a dramatic rise in the number of enterprises deploying different service providers as part of a multi-cloud strategy. Thus enabling them to pursue greater agility and flexibility within a hybrid environment. 

My own organization's research found that most IT professionals use two-plus cloud platforms today – and just under half (48%) say they use a mix of public and private clouds. However, the reality is that the more cloud environments your organization use, the more complex it becomes to both manage and secure them. Here are three multi-cloud management challenges impacting IT teams today, and how they can overcome them.

Maintaining Uptime in the Face of Rising Security Challenges

Avoiding downtime has never been more important, nor has it been more challenging to achieve. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and increasing the risk of natural disasters or power outages, leading to data loss. In fact, 65% of U.S. and UK IT decision-makers told us their organization experienced at least one data loss incident last year, while 21% admit they experienced two data loss incidents.

But it's perhaps security challenges that pose the biggest threat to IT teams. Since the onset of Covid-19, organizations have been grappling with cyberattackers targeting them far more often and infiltrating them much more quickly. According to McAfee, there were 3.1 million cloud-based cyberattacks in 2020 alone. Unsurprisingly, these attacks are fueling concern in IT circles. 88% of U.S. and UK decision-makers told us they're at least slightly worried – and 15% are apprehensive – about cloud workload security in 2022. 

Multi-cloud environments cause inherent configuration and visibility problems, and this is where cyberattackers can take advantage of weaknesses. The complexity of migrating data across different cloud platforms and operating systems can also lead to delays with patching. The key is often ensuring visibility across these platforms and maintaining interoperability. Security platforms for multi-cloud environments must be set up to share threat information across providers and platforms. If not, threats can easily be missed, or even if they are detected, the response across infrastructure will be too slow to minimize damage. 

With businesses accelerating their goal of becoming 100% cloud-native in the next few years, a cloud-based disaster recovery strategy must also be embedded within their management plans. Without one, every business risks losing vital data and having their systems, operations, or services shut down by natural and man-made disasters, security risks, hardware failures, and power outages.

Staying in Front of Hidden Charges

Cloud spending has skyrocketed in the past two years, and all signs suggest that organizations will continue to allocate more of their IT budgets to the cloud over the years to come. But not every business has the same resources as Apple, which reportedly spends over $30 million a month on Amazon's cloud, according to a 2019 CNBC story. The reality for most IT teams is that they're constantly battling hidden charges and unexpected cloud costs that threaten to blow up their entire IT budget. 

In fact, in Flexera's 2022 State of the Cloud report, respondents self-estimated that their organizations waste just under a third (32%) of their cloud spend, up from 30% last year. Meanwhile, my firm Wanclouds found that 54% of British and American IT professionals say they have been hit with unexpected cloud costs in the past year.

It's a severe problem throwing IT teams for a loop from the migration stages of the multi-cloud plans right through to management and maintenance. Sure, cloud providers like Amazon provide basic tools for resource tracking and spend visibility. But truthfully, these features generally fall short of providing real-time and enterprise-wide insights on how to optimize costs.

To eliminate the sticker shock of unanticipated cloud costs, organizations need to have a defined plan for cloud cost management. Again company-wide visibility into their cloud platforms' billing systems is imperative and a way to track spending across their multiple accounts. It's vital for companies to properly tag the infrastructure for understand costs and maintain to date inventory of all the resources.

Meeting Compliance Requirements

Every cloud user must comply with specific regulatory standards following industry guidelines and local, national, and international laws. Organizations in the healthcare space, for instance, must comply with HIPAA rules which are essentially a set of national standards to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient's consent or knowledge. Meanwhile, Manufacturing IT teams must abide by stringent intellectual property security protocols and protocols for other sensitive data like PCI and PII in manufacturing. 

Ensuring compliance across multiple cloud environments is necessary but undoubtedly a challenge. This is especially true in today's attack-filled security landscape, where internal threats can pose as much risk to data security as external attackers. (32% of the organizations surveyed by Varonis found incorrect access authorizations and privileges assigned to users). Of course, this isn't to mention compliance requirements are constantly changing, making it even more difficult for organizations to meet demands.  

This is why every IT and security professional invested in the cloud needs a solution that lets them set up compliance policies against their cloud infrastructure, making it easy for them to ensure compliance requirements in the case of any unforeseen natural disasters or security incidents. We've seen the damage that just one data breach can have on a business – costing them millions of dollars in damage cleanup and leaving them with considerable dents to their reputation. It's therefore imperative that their entire multi-cloud strategy prioritizes compliance and the security of sensitive data. 

Author:

Faiz Khan, founder, and CEO at Wanclouds

Faiz Khan is the CEO and founder at Wanclouds, a leading multi-cloud SaaS and managed service provider. Prior to founding Wanclouds, Faiz was an executive at Cisco and played multiple technology leadership roles. His latest assignment was leading the Global Cloud automation and orchestration organization. Prior to that, he built the Global Datacenter and cloud practice and was the GM for the Emerging Markets Technology Practices Organization. Faiz has an MBA in Computer Information Systems from Colorado State University.