Many companies see multicloud as the best way forward for their hosting needs. If you think it is the right approach for your business, you should first have a data strategy in place. This will allow you to avoid complexities in your IT infrastructure as well as better take advantage of the many benefits multicloud infrastructure offers.
In addition, beginning with a strategy in mind with the multicloud approach toward data management can go a long way in optimizing data management and minimizing risks.
Also read: Top 7 Data Management Trends to Watch in 2022
Multicloud Environments for Enterprise Functionality
If you find it challenging to match the different cloud platforms against the various needs of your organization, you might appreciate how difficult hosting can get.
Fortunately, developing a multicloud infrastructure can help you avoid haphazardly appending data clouds into a complex architecture that is difficult to maintain and manage. Using different clouds in such a way can be beneficial in several ways.
- Flexibility
A common problem IT managers face is that one cloud service provider might be perfect for a portion of the organization’s functionality. In contrast, another service might be better suited for other applications. For example, a proprietary cloud would be perfect for hosting proprietary apps but might not be cost-efficient for storing public records. In a case like this, multicloud allows you to use an appropriate cloud suited to a particular area.
- Proximity
When you are operating globally, you might have to make additional efforts to manage compliance with the local data sovereignty laws. In this case, you could host a part of your workload with regional cloud providers. It will have the additional benefit of better speeds for the end user.
- Shadow IT
Multicloud is a straightforward approach to consolidating shadow IT architectures. Shadow IT has become common today, partly because of the ease of use offered by cloud services. However, it is a kind of data silo that causes redundancies and security issues and ultimately slows you down.
- Failover
Multicloud ensures business continuity by offering backup that can scale with your enterprise and host data and workflows. This would mean getting back up in no time and without any data loss in the case of an outage.
In disaster recovery, you would typically restart the service. However, there might be a chance that it doesn’t work. In that case, if you have a secondary cloud, you can deploy the service there and reduce recovery time.
Also read: AWS vs Azure vs Google vs Alibaba: Compare Top Cloud Providers
Multicloud and Data Management
Multicloud presents a unique architecture, with specific requirements for data migration and storage. Having a multicloud approach will require data management strategies specifically designed for it. However, it must be noted that having a new data management strategy offers several advantages of its own, such as:
- If the demand for the workload increases beyond capacity, also known as cloud-burst, a secondary cloud can provide the additional space while the primary cloud deals with the regular traffic.
- Applications typically deploy all service instances to every available location. However, with multicloud, you can selectively deploy data based on the hardware availability.
- Multicloud abolished the trend of proprietary formats, which made users dependent on a particular cloud solution, and made it possible for users to be independent of the cloud service it uses.
- Multicloud favors analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) operations. AI and machine learning can be used to filter through data for metrics that help you improve operations and predict issues.
- Ultimately, multicloud allows a holistic model for data management by reducing architecture complexity. Though there will be serious changes in on-premises architecture, the result will be better optimized.
How Multicloud Helps with Data Management Best Practices
Data management best practices are equally applicable to multicloud as they would be to any other approach, and they must be planned and executed with due diligence.
1. Having a plan
Having multiple environments needs properly designed and documented ways to manage the data generated. Simply having the same old strategy and applying it across platforms does not work and will limit full functionality, such as collaboration. A good strategy will account for ongoing changes and be open to adoption.
2. Addressing complexity
A multicloud environment would have multiple locations on-premises and across clouds, leading to more complexity. In the end, your architecture should work seamlessly between them, which requires a good data strategy.
3. Compliance and data sovereignty
While data compliance requirements can be complicated, they get even trickier with the new complex architecture. Cloud backups solve the issue for you to an extent. Use proper resources for data mobility and consistency to ease up your workload.
Challenges for Data Management
A successful multicloud strategy addresses the following challenges that anyone operating over the cloud will inevitably face at some point.
Security concerns
Having multiple clouds means moving and managing data across different channels and, inevitably, more access points. Unfortunately, more access points make your database more vulnerable to security threats, so security must be built in every step of the way.
Data governance
Globally, regulations such as GDPR and CCPA require users and providers to share the accountability for privacy breaches. A multicloud strategy would increase the data governance requirements due to having more clouds, which in turn increases the liability for your organization.
Visibility
Having applications running on different clouds would lead to issues with the invisibility of the cloud storage landscape. It would further demand more tools and processes to function, which can sometimes be difficult to manage.
Data migration
There is still a lack of cloud-native tools to migrate data between providers. You are likely to require third-party migration tools, meaning extra licensing costs.
Also read: Cloud Security Best Practices for 2022
Adopting Best Data Management Practices
The requirement of data management practices remains the same, but their complexity varies with multicloud. Multicloud not only supports data management best practices but in some cases mandates them. Data management on multicloud can be tricky, but it has many benefits if done right.
To make full use of multicloud, and create a strategy capable of addressing the varying complexities of the new system, never try to replicate the same methodologies across the whole enterprise. This can limit your return on investment (ROI) and lead to poor performance, as it would further aggravate the possibility of having data silos and lead to a lack of visibility across cloud storage environments. Have a plan can help you reach data synergies, leading to cost optimization.
You need the right data management strategy, from planning and migrating data to running day-to-day operations. A good strategy will include consideration of data protection and security, visibility, and governance. In the end, you want to get the best features of all the cloud options that you choose and seamless data management so your IT department can focus on innovation instead of maintenance.
Read next: Unifying Data Management with Data Fabrics
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