The multi-cloud management market is expected to grow from USD 1,169.5 million in 2017 to USD 4,492.7 million by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 30.9 per cent from 2017 to 2022.
Avoidance of vendor lock-ins, increased agility and automation and the rising need for a high level of governance and policy are the major factors that are expected to drive the market.
Additionally, with the rise of adoption of containerisation and microservices for cloud-native applications, there is increased adoption of a multi-cloud strategy by enterprises, a Markets and Markets report added.
Multi-cloud is becoming a necessity for enterprises as it enables growth, innovation, and productivity. By distributing the workload across multiple cloud environments, organisations are experiencing better cloud performance, an increase in efficiency, savings, and risk mitigation related to individual cloud architectures.
“Multi-cloud approach offers flexibility to organisations to use optimal cloud infrastructure mapped to their business needs such as geographical spread, and functional among others,” said Abhijit Mazumder, Chief Information Officer & Global Head Sales Enablement, Tata Consultancy Services.
He further pointed out that some of the best practices in multi-cloud adoption include, defining service catalogs: For a multi-cloud strategy to be a success, the organisations services catalog needs to be curated in a way that diverse product teams can utilise it with minimal effort.
The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) needs to be tasked with standardising these to ensure that the same problem is not being solved by multiple engineering groups and in multiple ways. Portability: It is recommended that organisations use open-source implementations of managed services as well as vendor-agnostic products for deployment within the cloud.
This ensures that any movement from one cloud to another is not prohibitively difficult owing to challenges from an unsupported technology stack. At the same time, we must be cognizant of the force being exerted on enterprise architecture due to the difficulty of pulling out large amounts of data from cloud environments, aka “data gravity”.
Multi-cloud (agnostic) IAC: Infra as Code (IAC) is one of the most powerful abilities the cloud provides allowing small teams to manage and run infrastructure orders of much larger magnitude than was possible traditionally. In a multi-cloud environment, IAC tools/frameworks that are not cloud-specific allow the organisations engineering teams to use the same toolset and pipelines to provision services on multiple clouds.
“This ensures that the learning curve is minimised, and deployment tools are standardised thereby improving engineering productivity as well as removing lock-in as a consideration and Network Architecture: One of the key elements responsible for the success of a multi-cloud strategy is the robustness of the network architecture,” said Mazumder.
As it is now well known, a key cost center in the cloud world is the data egress cost which is charged by the cloud vendors for data exiting their network. The design for the network as well as application placement must ensure that applications with heavy data transfer requirements are placed close together and the cross-cloud network is resilient enough to provide seamless connectivity between applications hosted across two different clouds.
“Today, TCS supports 400 large customers on AWS. TCS is a Microsoft Gold Partner with over 1,000 successful ‘modern workplace’ and Azure engagements for more than 225 global customers,” added Mazumder.
Choosing a multi-cloud management platform
Industry watchers opine that choosing the right mix of multi-cloud models requires careful forethought.
“The main feature while choosing a multi-cloud management platform is that it should provide the capability of “develop once and deploy globally”. Hence, we must consider some best-in-class features while choosing a multi-cloud management platform such as Self-service provisioning – Capabilities that enable deployment of cloud services on-demand via GUI, APIs which further translate provisioning and management requests into target cloud and native API requests,” said Mazumder.
Service Orchestration is the ability to orchestrate multiple cloud services to achieve application blueprint deployment across multi-clouds based on the application’s requirement
Service Availability and Performance Monitoring provides proper insights and analytics on services reliability and performance which can help application service owners for better application development and management Cloud Service Cost Monitoring and Optimisation – Helps keep track of cloud resources deployment sprawl and cost associated with the same. The tool should provide capabilities such as right-sizing recommendations, and Reserve instances of usage to optimise the cost.
Cloud Compliance and Governance Monitoring provides capabilities to monitor security standards and government policies such as specific cloud resource size usage, internet exposure blocking via public IP address allocation restrictions but also to have auto-remediation in case policies are getting deviated by end-users on such resource deployments.
