It's easier now than ever before to implement a cloud service for your business operations. Whether it's just administrative, or whether you've relocated the bulk of your digital work to a virtual machine, this type of industrial change has become increasingly familiar to various verticals. With the advent of using cloud computing and managing workloads through the cloud comes the rise of another practice, too: multi-cloud strategy.
Some business process types are simple enough to migrate into one cloud service for implementation. But, not every business process looks like that. In fact, it's become common for users to utilize numerous virtual machines in the creation of their new and improved business processes. Especially for production processes that involve several disparate activities.
This is a multi-cloud strategy. Often it makes certain evolutions in cloud-based computing possible in the same way that you’d expand a factory’s capabilities by adding new mechanical components. In a multi-cloud strategy, the goal is always to treat the whole system of cloud services like one machine and one process. Thus creating a workload that will eventually bring the business back to the end result.
There are many reasons why people choose to migrate their processes to the cloud. Often, employing multiple cloud services often requires more necessity. For example, a process developing outside the cloud might be transferred with the hope of fully automating the process. Or, even just having it all occur off-premises. However, when a business migrates multiple of their work containers to the cloud, they may find that the size limits or speed limits of a particular container aren’t enough to serve their needs online. Thus, by splitting these up, they have higher productivity and quicker turnaround.
A less pressing need, but one that drives this decision nonetheless, is when a business wants to explore the way that cloud services can solve their existing problems. As a relatively new technological environment, cloud services stand as a focus of great interest. Especially for people looking to optimize their business processes with an agenda of curiosity and experimentation.
Overall, multi-cloud strategies are proven to have some significant benefits. These can attract both types of businesses listed above. The autonomy of the processes, the lowered risk for human error, and a higher value of cost-efficient work are all prime examples.
Whether it’s out of necessity or experimentation, implementing a multi-cloud strategy means that a business has to contend with specific security challenges. More than that, this type of strategy also has to deal with specific challenges that only come out of having multiple cloud services in place. The below are examples of these, along with solutions that can help with each.
One challenge that initially sounds like it would be a good thing is the diversification of security knowledge over the scope of the architecture. You may have a cyber security team of 20, or one person handling the majority of this responsibility. Whatever the case, though, adding more environments, more services, and more programs that need intimate security knowledge means that your team becomes divided in that knowledge. For smaller teams, this might mean no one gets to be an expert. This is because the pool of necessary knowledge is now so large. Larger teams will, of course, fare better here.
However, for every member that is capable of becoming an expert on security for one cloud service, there are multiple that will have no such specialization. This then means they also are not part of a cost-efficient workforce anymore. Thus, your cost in security training will need to rise as a result. This is where enterprise-wide security responsibility becomes imperative. You might find yourself looking for a security platform that makes it easier to manage all aspects from a central place. Such tools are the way of the future when it comes to orchestrating and managing the multifaceted approach to security that multi-cloud strategies require.
There’s a significant amount of work in the hands of virtual machines. Especially when transitioning to a multi-cloud strategy, and that’s the goal. No one wants to burden themselves with the tedium of unskilled or repetitive labor. Implementing a strong cloud workload is a great way to ease that burden.
However, there is a problem with this: with the lessening of human intervention, there are unwatched portions of every workload, every process, that can even become vulnerable to cyber attacks, data leaks, problematic transfers, and more without the knowledge of the user. By using a cloud workload protection platform, you can bypass those issues: this kind of platform not only increases visibility across all your cloud services, but it can protect against the vulnerabilities that may arise and even alert you to them when noticed.
Building a multi-cloud architecture means you’re able to have multiple linking services sharing relevant information with each other. Thus, leaving you out of some tedious tasks and data transfers. However, due to the multi-housed nature of this workload type, there are concerns about the method of transfers. However, you also must consider the governance that each service has in accordance with certain industry standards.
Depending on your business, you may have to consider multiple such governances. Often, sharing data between cloud services directly may violate the guidelines of these. However, by implementing a singular, centralized platform to manage the workload, you can also utilize this centralization. This can store data separately from the black boxes of each cloud service. Thus, allowing the separate data engine to share only what’s relevant to each container in kind when it becomes necessary. For this reason, data security in a multi-cloud environment is possible. All without having to manually handle requirements of data governance.
