Three Major Challenges for Enterprises to Introduce a Multi-Cloud Environment

Cloud deployment has become a necessary IT strategy for enterprises to go to the cloud. According to VMware's survey, 75% of enterprises have used more than two public clouds, and 40% of them will use three or more public clouds. As more and more enterprises have accelerated their pace of migrating to the cloud, and the demand for digital transformation and application modernization continues to increase, we expect that multi-cloud deployment will be the mainstream development of enterprise IT in the next 20 years, and it can bring enterprises a multi-cloud strategy with advantages such as elasticity, agility, and efficient management will also be an important consideration for enterprises when deploying the cloud.

The characteristic of multi-cloud deployment is that it can choose and match different public clouds and private clouds according to the needs of enterprises, and place them in different clouds according to the nature and purpose of data; in addition, multi-cloud deployment can also avoid relying on a single cloud provider. It allows enterprises to flexibly use, manage, and build multi-cloud platforms, and through the agility of modern applications, it can improve business flexibility and meet demand. At present, many enterprises are processing customer data analysis and developing new services through modern cloud-based applications to meet the ever-changing market demands.

For example, a VMware retailer customer in Europe, whose subsidiaries are located all over Europe, was forced to close most of its retail stores after the outbreak, but because the data center upgraded the HCI core architecture to a multi-cloud deployment in time, allowing they can flexibly manage the data kept in various countries/regions due to regulatory restrictions, and fulfill the need to integrate data from various regions due to recent acquisitions. Because of the consistent and standardized cloud management environment, it not only reduces the workload of IT department data relocation, etc., so that customers have the confidence to devote resources to the new requirements of application modernization.

Although introducing a multi-cloud strategy can bring many advantages to enterprises, including improving cost control, reducing management complexity, simplifying interoperability issues, and ensuring security and data sovereignty governance. However, the multi-cloud distributed enterprise IT architecture and diversified workloads still increase the difficulty of operation management and system integration for enterprises. Therefore, when introducing multi-cloud deployment, most enterprises face the following three major challenges:

1. Shortage Of Multi-Cloud Technical Talents

Multi-Cloud deployment means that enterprise IT personnel need to face the control platforms and tools of multiple cloud providers, especially when enterprises go to the cloud to become a prominent industry, there is a serious shortage of professional and technical talents, so 85% organizations say they lack professional talent to optimize cloud infrastructure.

2. Improper Multi-Cloud Management May Increase Costs

After building a multi-cloud architecture, if efficient management tools cannot be introduced, and technical teams such as application development, core architecture, and data security are allowed to establish good and smooth communication channels, in the process of management and integration high costs may be incurred.

3. Ensuring The Privacy and Security of Data

Ensuring the privacy and security of corporate data is a crucial issue, especially in a multi-cloud IT environment. More frequently than in the past, it has become a major challenge for enterprises to migrate to the cloud. In addition, for enterprises' cross-border data centers with multi-cloud architecture, it is another important issue to comply with the data laws and regulations of various countries/regions, and to ensure data privacy while increasing business revenue.

Enterprises going to the cloud and introducing a multi-cloud architecture must face the above challenges, so what is the key to success? It is suggested that enterprises can introduce a single platform and tool set to build, deploy, and simplify cloud-native applications, while managing networks and storage between multiple clouds. Through consistent strategies for multi-cloud deployment, technical IT personnel can become familiar with multi-cloud platforms as soon as possible. environment, monitor and manage the performance of enterprise applications, and ensure connectivity and security in multi-cloud operations in order to maintain a multi-cloud platform environment with high cost-effectiveness.