With more employees working from home, enterprises are either accelerating their cloud strategies or rushing to begin embracing cloud solutions. The result, as cloud investments expand, is the implementation of multi-cloud environments.

While multi-cloud can provide for efficient workload placement and prevent vendor lock-in, it also carries the danger of uncontrolled cloud sprawl. The endless options related to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS) can cause even seasoned IT teams to encounter challenges in managing a multi-cloud environment.

When cloud sprawl begins to emerge as a problem, easy-to-deploy applications allow departments to shift to the cloud without IT guidance, or the organization may find themselves using certain platforms without being able to remember why they implemented it. Fortunately, there are steps enterprises can take to develop a mission-focused, controlled path for multi-cloud.

Enterprises can take time at the beginning of their cloud journey to attempt to understand their need for different services across the organization, building a strategy for a holistic move to multi-cloud. Cloud-native apps should be modular and have an open design with standard functionality. Here are five steps to ensure cloud efficiency:

1. Create governance: Multi-cloud governance establishes who has the authority to spin up a new cloud environment. It also helps determine how providers are vetted and implemented into existing architectures, as well as how changes are made to that architecture. Governance establishes how to distribute costs across the enterprise and whether the organization will use a federated or centralized approach.
2. Prioritize extensible infrastructure: This allows enterprises the ability to integrate new capabilities into an existing environment, whether it’s in the same or across multiple providers. The infrastructure needs to be open, using microservices and application programming interfaces (APIs) that make it easier to innovate, scale, and avoid the dreaded vendor lock-in.
3. Standardize Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The use of provisioning templates and IaC in a multi-cloud environment significantly reduces the likelihood of human error throughout deployment and configuration. It also allows the enterprise the freedom to establish blueprints for deploying and securing resources throughout their multi-cloud environment, as well as create automated security controls.
4. Implement DataOps: Enterprises often overlook data, a complex part of multi-cloud planning. A clear strategy and implementation ensures improved management and boosts security efforts so that you can better leverage data services.
5. Consider organization needs: Your enterprise may not be quite ready to embrace a robust cloud strategy, much less get on board with optimizing operations for cloud efficiency. Evaluating your culture and buy-in across your workforce will help you better prepare for multi-cloud success. It’s better to start off simple and allow your organization to experience some initial wins before diving into a broader strategy.For more detailed planning advice for your multi-cloud strategy, contact us at Access Tech. Your strategy should lead to cloud efficiency, but you may require a guide along the way.