What is multi-cloud management?
Multi-cloud management describes tools and strategies that allow companies to control and monitor resources across multiple cloud environments.
Organisations that want to facilitate digital transformation, reduce data-storage costs and improve their IT performance and productivity are taking advantage of cloud solutions. As such, we say that these groups are migrating to the cloud, but the reality is that, for many companies, it would be more accurate to say that they are migrating to multiple clouds. This is because more and more businesses are spreading their data and applications through a multi-cloud environment.
As previously stated, a multi-cloud approach may benefit organisations by allowing them to combine benefits from multiple cloud vendors. Multi-cloud management takes this even further, giving businesses invaluable support and control over their multi-cloud environments. More specifically, the benefits of multi-cloud management include the following:
Reduced strain on IT teams
Multi-cloud management brings solutions for monitoring, securing and controlling multiple clouds together onto a single, centralised platform. With all relevant data and controls in one place, working from a single view of the truth, IT teams can more efficiently approach cloud-management tasks and assess cloud performance as they manage workloads across multiple clouds.
Improved security
The more clouds an organisation uses, the greater the attack surface that may be exploited by threat actors. At the same time, creating and enforcing reliable security policies becomes more difficult when working with multiple cloud vendors. Effective multi-cloud management solutions shore up these weaknesses, by providing features that allow for improved security monitoring, security-policy enforcement and essential automation solutions. This makes it possible for users to protect their vital data, address weaknesses before they can be exploited and respond quickly to emergent threats.
Better cost management
Often, organisations will migrate to the cloud as a way of reducing data-management costs. However, when working with multiple cloud vendors, it can be easy to lose track of cloud spend, resulting in a greater investment than anticipated. Multi-cloud management resolves this issue by tracking and reporting on all cloud expenses and may even offer intelligent data analysis to ensure that the organisation in question is getting the optimal ROI. Additionally, multi-cloud management allows businesses to compare prices associated with different vendors to find the optimal rates to meet their unique requirements.
Increased availability
In keeping with the adage of never placing all the eggs in one basket, a multi-cloud approach helps ensure that if one cloud solution experiences downtime, it won’t necessarily impact the organisation; workloads may be shifted between cloud vendors to keep everything up and running until a solution may be found. Additionally, by hosting data on regional clouds, businesses can give distant users local access, thus improving data response times.
Broad flexibility
Although it may be easy to find the perfect cloud solution for a single function or aspect of the organization, it’s much more difficult to locate the optimal solution in one vendor for every consideration. When no single cloud can perfectly perform every necessary function, multi-cloud environments allow businesses to pick and combine clouds based on their specialisations.
No vendor lock-in
When businesses have the power to operate effectively across multiple providers of the same cloud types, they find that they have many more options to choose from. Instead of being forced to work with a single vendor, they can shop around to find the vendor or vendors that best meet their IT requirements.
Unmatched scalability
IT demand is not constant; it increases or decreases based on a variety of factors. Multi-cloud management empowers organisations with the ability to easily scale up or down to meet changing storage needs.
Complete visibility
The more cloud environments that are being used, the more difficult it may be for an organisation to get a full, real-time picture of workloads and results across every associated vendor. Effective multi-cloud management resolves this issue, by bringing all relevant data to a single location. Users enjoy complete visibility, in real time, across the entire multi-cloud environment.
Capabilities that scale with your business
Foresee problems before they arise with ServiceNow.