Cloud deployments, Migrations, and protecting your Cloud infrastructure are time-consuming and costly endeavors. It requires expertise in Cloud, related tools, and experience. Moreover, managing and maintaining infrastructure across multiple Clouds adds to the operational challenges customers must deal with. As an enterprise, whether designing and deploying a new Cloud infrastructure, migrating from On-Prem to Cloud, moving across clouds, or setting up your Cloud Disaster Recovery and compliance strategy, you need the right automation, tools, and a holistic approach.
Additionally, maintaining ongoing and up-to-date visibility of your Multi-Cloud infrastructure and compliance guardrails is essential to overcome day-to-day operational challenges.
Operational Cloud Migration Challenges Faced by Enterprises
As businesses increasingly implement Cloud computing to increase scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, they face a variety of operational issues in migration from legacy systems to Cloud platforms or across various Cloud environments. The increasing complexity of managing multiple Cloud environments increases exponentially with the number of platforms used, presenting hurdles that can delay successful migration and ongoing operations. The following provides a more detailed examination of these issues, along with additional insights and considerations for businesses undergoing this transition.
Lack of Interoperability Among Cloud Platforms
The lack of interoperable protocols and interfaces between Cloud providers poses immense hindrances to moving workloads or applications. For instance, disparity in APIs, data formats, and virtualization tools may involve large-scale re-engineering of applications to fit the target Cloud infrastructure. Such a lack of compatibility is likely to result in vendor lock-in, where companies become locked into using one provider's ecosystem, thereby reducing flexibility and increasing costs in the long run.
Multi-Cloud Complexity
Organizations that use multiple Cloud providers, such as AWS, IBM, and Google Cloud, struggle to orchestrate and manage their varied environments. There are different management tools, security measures, and configurations for each platform, making it challenging to obtain a single, unified view of the infrastructure. This fragmentation makes it difficult to perform tasks such as resource allocation, performance optimization, and ensuring a consistent user experience across platforms.
Resource Monitoring and Optimization
With scaling Cloud infrastructure, it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor resource usage. Enterprises usually fail to monitor virtual machines, storage, and network resources on multiple Cloud systems in real-time. Without proper monitoring capabilities, businesses may over-provision, incurring unnecessary expenses, or under-provision, creating performance bottlenecks. Furthermore, recognizing idle or underused resources to lower costs depends on sophisticated analytics and automation.
Billing and Cost Management
Cloud billing behavior tends to be sophisticated, with costs varying by usage, storage capacity, data transfer, and other services. For a Multi-Cloud environment, combining billing data to obtain a good view of spend is a challenge. Companies may incur unplanned overspend due to misconfigured resources, underutilized usage, or failing to leverage cost-saving mechanisms such as reserved instances or spot pricing. Cost governance models must be defined, but applying them can prove difficult without visibility in the center.
Applying Compliance and Governance Policies
Governance policies (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR) and regulatory requirements must be implemented in Cloud environments. Maintaining uniform compliance across multiple Cloud environments is challenging due to the varying security controls and audit capabilities. For instance, applying data encryption, access controls, and auditing logs on all environments equally involves significant effort. Non-compliance can lead to legal action, data breaches, or damage to reputation.
Data Migration and Integrity
Importing large amounts of data to the Cloud or across Cloud environments involves risks to data integrity, consistency, and availability. Inadequate bandwidth, data format incompatibility, and downtime during the migration process can all interfere with business operations. Furthermore, ensuring the security of sensitive data both in transit and at rest requires strong encryption and access control, which further complicates the migration process.
Skill Gaps and Workforce Readiness
Cloud migration requires expertise in Cloud architecture, DevOps practices, and provider technology. Companies often lack the right staff with the necessary skills to handle complex migrations or optimize Cloud environments post-migration. It takes time and money to reskill existing staff or hire new ones, which can delay migrations and impact business efficiency.
Security and Risk Management
Migration to the Cloud brings new security threats, such as misconfigured access controls, Cloud-native app vulnerabilities, and exposure to provider-specific threats. Businesses must establish robust identity and access management (IAM) policies, secure their APIs, and implement continuous monitoring to mitigate risks effectively. Achieving a balance between security and operational mobility is a chronic challenge, especially for hybrid or Multi-Cloud deployments.
Re-Imagining Cloud-Native Data Management with Wanclouds
Wanclouds Multi Cloud Management is enabled through its SaaS-based automation suite, VPC+, providing a single pane of glass for managing and protecting multi-cloud environments through a centralized solution. VPC+ by Wanclouds lets you monitor and self-manage your multi-cloud environments through its intuitive dashboard, where you can easily add, delete, edit, or create components of your environment and track their status.
Below are some of the highlights of VPC+ by Wanclouds:
- Infrastructure Optimization: Optimize your network devices, servers, and Kubernetes for best performance, compliance, and maximum uptime.
- Powerful Visualization: Visualize your multi-cloud environments and get a granular view of your VPC and all its resources, and track policies on an ongoing basis across all your cloud accounts through our intuitive GUI
- Standardization & Compliance: Create and track compliance across all your cloud accounts, and receive alerts in the event of any policy violations.
Reduce costs by leveraging your infrastructure snapshots or pre-built templates, such as VPC blueprints, when restoring them on demand in the same or different regions for testing, validation, and pre-production purposes.
All of this under a single pane of glass!
Getting Started
Wanclouds is a leading multi-cloud SaaS solution and managed service provider. It helps enterprises with cloud deployments, migrations, and protecting their cloud infrastructure in a time and cost-efficient way. To get started, you can fill out our Request Form or contact one of our sales representatives at [email protected].
