To stay competitive in today’s ever-changing business environment, a company’s IT infrastructure must be agile enough to adapt to changing demands placed on it by both the business and its employees. Most businesses turn to the cloud to provide flexibility, since cloud computing enables businesses to scale up or down as needed, deliver services more quickly, and requires fewer resources to manage. In many cases, businesses are using more than one cloud service provider—such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform—to enable these benefits.
Enter multi-cloud, which is absolutely essential to an effective digital transformation strategy. In this blog, we’ll evaluate what the six key multi-cloud management challenges are and present our industry-leading solutions to address those challenges around cost, performance, visibility, security, automation, and migration.
6 Multi-Cloud Management Challenges and Solutions
BMC defines multi-cloud as a strategy that involves using multiple cloud services from multiple public cloud hosting providers, in combination with on-premises physical, virtual, and private cloud infrastructure. From a manageability perspective, IT needs to manage the entire IT infrastructure, not just cloud.
Cost
Challenge: IT and business owners are often surprised and unprepared for the large monthly or annual expenses of using cloud services. With many buyers of public cloud services throughout the organization, it’s challenging to control cloud costs and utilization.
Solution: With a single view of on-premises and public cloud infrastructure expenditures, BMC Helix Cloud Cost allows organizations to track and analyze infrastructure costs and utilization, identify wasted spend, and forecast future costs. And the ability to easily simulate migrations to AWS and Azure and compare on-premises and public cloud infrastructure costs allows applications to run on the most cost-efficient infrastructure.
Performance
Challenge: IT operations teams need to ensure the speed and performance of applications delivered to end users from complex multi-cloud environments. The scale at which IT needs to monitor data and identify problems cannot be effectively managed by humans alone. They must leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
Solution: TrueSight for Multi-Cloud is a turnkey solution that provides a comprehensive view of how key services are performing, so IT knows immediately if customer experiences may be impacted. TrueSight helps IT teams merge operational silos and streamline efforts across technology domains. Additionally, TrueSight uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and real-time monitoring and alerting that watches streaming metrics from web-scale applications and underlying cloud and on-premises infrastructure to deliver unparalleled agility and scalability.
Visibility
Challenge: Without comprehensive visibility into a multi-cloud environment, IT cannot consolidate and prioritize fixes, perform audits, and know what assets support which parts of the business.
Solution: BMC Helix Discovery creates a dynamic, holistic view of data center and multi-cloud assets, highlights their relationships, and gives IT crucial visibility into how the infrastructure enables the business. Each scan delves into the information and dependencies for all software, hardware, network, storage, and cloud services—providing IT with the context needed to create an application map from any piece of information about it.
Security
Challenge: One of the largest drivers of the inability to appropriately defend organizations from hackers is the lack of integration and coordination between security and operations teams. Security teams scan a multi-cloud environment for vulnerabilities and then deliver that information to the operations team for action. When the operations team receives information from the security team, it frequently lacks the context needed to take or prioritize action.
Solution: SecOps Response Service is a SaaS-based solution that extends the power of endpoint management systems to provide IT operations and security teams the data they need to prioritize and remediate threats based on potential impact to the business. Plus, it embeds compliance and security testing into the service delivery process by providing continuous verification, analytics, and governance.
Automation
Challenge: Managing workloads that span multiple disparate platforms creates the need to address real-time processing and orchestration. Application development organizations, especially in a multi-cloud environment, are slowed by their manual processes for creating and modifying workflows and getting applications into production.
Solution: Control-M improves workflow services performance and usability, and reduces operating inefficiencies with capabilities, such as out-of-the-box predictive analytics,
automated agent and client deployment for faster upgrades and maintenance, and a time-saving global calendar. And Control-M enhances automated application workflow promotion in the DevOps process through automated job promotion across multi-cloud environments.
Migration
Challenge: Guidance and best practices are necessary to assess which workloads and applications should be moved into the cloud and what cost efficiencies can be achieved by doing so.
Solution: BMC Cloud Consulting Services helps validate and create a strategy for transitioning current applications to the most cost-effective cloud environments, help execute the transition, and manage and monitor those applications and environments in the most efficient way.
The Bottom Line
Multi-cloud management solutions from BMC are the keys to accelerating your organization’s digital transformation. With BMC solutions, you’ll optimize use of the cloud in the most cost-effective way, ensure performance of cloud-based applications, deliver accurate asset and dependency information to assist in decision making, remediate multi-cloud security issues based on service impact and business exposure, automate workloads across diverse cloud and on-premises environments, and analyze and assist in smooth migrations to the cloud.
