Are you considering a move from a single cloud environment to a multi-cloud environment? When cloud computing first emerged, it seemed like one cloud solution was the way to go. IT wrongly assumed that one cloud could meet the varied needs of the modern-day enterprise. For this reason, organizations started by moving applications to the public cloud with a bit of refactoring. 

After cloud computing became widely accepted for less mission-critical applications, IT began to move more applications to the cloud. The need for more services and applications eventually led to the need for the multi-cloud. 

Reasons for Moving to Multi-Cloud

Some reasons organizations eventually move to a multi-cloud architecture include:

What Challenges Necessitate the Move from Single Cloud to Multi-Cloud?

The unique challenges organizations face when using the cloud often necessitates moving from a single cloud to a multi-cloud. Today, organizations are using multiple public and private clouds to prevent vendor lock-in, deploy applications, and exploit best-of-breed solutions. 

You should consider a multi-cloud strategy if your organization is facing any of these issues:

  1. Users are often not close to a data center or any office.
  2. Users are in different geographical areas or even international.
  3. DevOps teams need separate testing or development environments. 
  4. Your organization is a likely target of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks that could put a strain on infrastructure. 
  5. The organization’s security policies or concerns call for having some data and infrastructure situated in a private cloud or even on-premises. 
  6. You have service requests distributed globally. This makes it necessary to distribute workloads across data centers to optimize performance. 
  7. Your organization already has multiple cloud contracts, and you want to centralize access and management. 
  8. There are multiple cloud contracts whose costs are spinning out of control. 

What are the Advantages of Moving from a Single-Cloud to Multi-Cloud Architecture? 

The application of multi-cloud environments might be a tough concept to fully grasp. But the idea is simple. It’s about your organization choosing to distribute its assets, applications, software, and redundancies across several clouds. 

The whole concept might seem to go against the grain. After all, having all your “eggs” in one basket seems like the best way to keep your information secure. Multi-cloud, on the surface, looks like a huge security risk for many organizations. In addition, most public cloud providers encourage organizations to host all their services with them. They even give plenty of discounts and perks. 

However, the multi-cloud model is not without its perks. Using multiple cloud providers might just be what you need to push your organization’s digital transformation to the next level. Here are some of the benefits of making the move from a single cloud environment to a multi-cloud environment:

  1. It gives organizations the power of choice, so they can avoid vendor lock-in. 
  2. Organizations can take advantage of the benefit each cloud provider has to offer. It’s the proverbial having your cake and eating it, too. 
  3. It puts organizations where they can maximize their cloud budgets by distributing workloads where they run most efficiently and cost-effectively. 

Conclusion

For a small organization with minimal cloud computing needs, sticking to a single cloud service provider is a no-brainer. But for enterprises with a complex IT infrastructure and heavy technological needs, a solid multi-cloud strategy can make a significant difference to the bottom line. 

Are you wondering what VMware Cloud Automation Services can do for you? Managing and troubleshooting cloud environments is often challenging, especially for complex cloud architectures. As a result, organizations must consider cloud automation. 

Cloud automation can help organizations to streamline oversight of cloud implementations. Organizations can do this with VMware Cloud Automation Services tools to hide the differences between cloud APIs and cloud vendors. As a result, it becomes easier to manage a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud deployment. 

What Is VMware Cloud Automation Services Suite? 

Cloud Automation Services Suite from VMware is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering meant for multi-cloud management and automation. Three products make up the suite:

Cloud Assembly is the blueprinted engine. It allows users to deploy containers or infrastructure to any private or public cloud. 

Service Broker serves as the “storefront.” It’s a catalog of the services available to end-users. IT can tailor policies and request forms that organizations can apply to available services to maintain organizational controls. These controls include cost, access, naming, etc. 

This is the Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) platform of VMware Cloud Automation Services. It relies on the concept of “pipelines” for the automation of application and infrastructure delivery. IT can integrate existing tools, such as Jenkins and GitLab while using CodeStream to orchestrate the flow. 

Types of Cloud Automation

Organizations have two types of cloud automation to choose from. The first type provides support for the data center operations of your organization. The second type provides hosting for mobile applications and websites at scale. AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud provide organizations with public cloud hardware for both scenarios. CodeStream, Service Broker, and Cloud Assembly all plug into the VMware vCloud platform to support DevOps and software development teams. 

For the first type of automation, organizations leverage the public cloud’s benefits in their on-premises deployments or the hybrid cloud. These benefits include faster provisioning, self-service, policies, and automated operations. In the second type, organizations improve network traffic speeds via SDN and load balancing utilities. At the same time, they serve web and mobile apps to millions of users per day. 

Why Your Organization Needs VMware Cloud Automation Services

Automating common workflows in your organization can be a valuable tool. Provisioning, deprovisioning, troubleshooting, and auditing are critical tasks that can benefit from automation. The more automation your organization deploys, the less manual effort you require to manage cloud resources. 

Here’s why you need VMware Cloud Automation Services:

Reducing Expenses

One key benefit of using the cloud is you shifting the expenses associated with maintaining servers to the cloud provider. However, this benefit only makes sense if you manage the process properly. For this reason, you need to design IT systems in a way that automatically provisions and deprovisions resources as needed. This reduces manual interaction significantly and helps curb zombie IT. Consequently, your organization is better able to control cloud costs. 

IT Security

Many consider cloud computing to be more secure than enterprise IT deployment. But this is not true. Moving workloads to the cloud presents organizations with new and sometimes unexpected challenges. 

With VMware cloud automation, organizations can automate network and security provisioning across clouds. This ensures your data is safe both inflight and at rest. Creating and maintaining good cloud security is one of the most tangible benefits of automation. 

Improved Performance

If your cloud environment is not well-designed nor well-implemented, then application performance can suffer. One provider should serve the critical parts of applications running in the cloud to reduce latency caused by communication between components. Applications that can take advantage of multiple clouds can optimize client-to-cloud location selection.

VMware cloud automation tools allow you to monitor cloud performance in real time. The tools use thousands of counters and metrics to analyze your cloud environments and send alters so you can proactively troubleshoot. 

Resilience

A well-implemented cloud strategy incorporates a foundation that enables you to run applications in several availability zones by more than one cloud vendor. VMware allows your organization to deploy applications across clouds hosted in different locations and by different providers. 

Troubleshooting

One of the challenges organizations face after moving to the cloud is troubleshooting infrastructure they don’t own. Often, the data needed to troubleshoot an enterprise network is unavailable. As a result, organizations must rely on digital user experience monitoring tools.

VMware tools can help your organization capture detailed diagnostic information and produce comprehensive client views to server application performance. 

Cut Down on Error-Prone Processes/Tasks

Cloud automation can help cut down on error-prone manual tasks and processes and deliver infrastructure resources much faster. Your organization’s cloud automation efforts should support virtualization standards and multiple hypervisors across hardware resources. Some of these resources include XenServer, KVM, Hyper-V, Docker, and Kubernetes. These efforts must also support the software development life cycle of dev teams in the organization.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

Pandemic accelerates moves to the cloud

Ian Barker, Beta News, Dec. 17, 2020

“The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major influence on spending and digital transformation plans in 2020 with many businesses speeding up plans to move to the cloud.

A new study from BillingPlatform of 300 CFOs and senior finance executives shows that this trend is likely to continue into 2021. Respondents named their three top priorities as investing in cloud-based technologies (42 percent), identifying ways to drive higher revenue through new products and services (41 percent) and reducing operating costs or capital investments (36 percent).”

Working from home looks set to stay for public sector employees

David Marshall, VMBlog, Dec. 16, 2020

“Investments in cloud (29%) and hardware (26%) were predicted to see the biggest spend increases over the next 12 months as organisations adjusted their IT infrastructure to reflect the new working culture, followed by security (13%) and virtual desktop Infrastructure (10%).

‘This research shows that public sector IT teams have been incredibly quick and versatile in adjusting to the requirements of the pandemic and successful in keeping vital public sector services operational,’ said Simon Townsend, Chief Marketing Officer at IGEL. ‘In less than a few months, work from home and remote working computing demands have gone beyond being simply desired, to becoming essential. The priority moving forward is to establish a resilient IT infrastructure to support the significant proportion of the workforce that will continue operating remotely. Large distributed workforces and the resulting trend towards widespread cloud migration is transforming how the public sector manages and secures endpoints, fueling demand for virtual apps, desktops and cloud workspaces.’”

Does free cloud training come with a catch? If it’s vendor-specific, maybe.

Katie Malone, CIO Dive, Dec. 16, 2020

“Most training programs from vendors offer free upskilling for non-technical employees or those seeking entry-level cloud positions, and free training supports basic tech literacy. Programs establish a baseline to inform and educate employees about the cloud in the modern workplace.

While benefiting businesses with tight IT budgets by providing free training, vendors are motivated to spread tool use far and wide to lock more companies into their services.” 

Experience the leading hybrid cloud management and orchestration solution. Request a CloudBolt demo today.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

Don’t take cloud security for granted

Stephen Withers, IT Wire, Dec. 14, 2020

“Compliance is important, and those involved need to understand risks and what’s required in terms of reporting and auditability.

It’s also important to understand the shared responsibility model. For example, a cloud provider will ensure the physical security of its data centres, but it’s up to the clients to control access to their systems.”

Preparing for 2021: The acceleration of the cloud

Jenny Darmody, Silicon Republic, Dec. 14, 2020

“As businesses look ahead to 2021, Bouguen said that cloud computing must be a business agenda. ‘Considering cloud computing as an IT-only topic creates a risk in not being agile enough to adapt to the rapid evolution of the society,’ he said.

‘Cloud computing must activate the full power of organisation and ecosystem to unlock operational efficiencies and create new revenue streams in response to changing market dynamics. As companies rethink their business, they must look for opportunities to reuse existing capabilities to drive new revenue streams and continually test and learn to turn their strategic bets into outcomes.’”

What distributed cloud means for businesses

Katie Malone, CIO Dive, Dec. 14, 2020

“Flourishing at a 17% compound annual growth rate in the cloud market, hybrid cloud, multicloud and edge computing environments are setting the stage for a distributed model, but businesses strategizing for the future require a clean cloud strategy to realize the benefits, according to Smith. 

By 2024, Gartner predicts most cloud service platforms will provide at least some distributed cloud services that execute at the point of need.”

Experience the leading hybrid cloud management and orchestration solution. Request a CloudBolt demo today.

Preventing unforeseeable disasters that cause business outages and product loss is one of the most significant challenges for IT experts today. The AWS Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) helps you store and restore data to minimize disasters that may cause loss of infrastructure, plans, and data. While there are many DR strategy initiatives in the market, AWS offers several service options within its own ecosystem that ensure business continuity.

These are the top 10 DR use cases and AWS solutions:

  1. DR for applications hosted in AWS: AWS Regions, Availability Zones
  2. DR for applications hosted outside of AWS: DataSync, AWS Import/Export
  3. Data Backup and Restore: AWS BackUp, AWS Import/Export, EBS
  4. Business Continuity Planning (BCP): Amazon WorkSpaces, AWS BackUp, CloudEndure, S3
  5. Data Lakes and Analytics: Data Movement, Data Lake, Analytics, Machine Learning
  6. Infrastructure Modernization: Server Migration Service, RDS, Elastic Beanstalk
  7. Data Archive: S3 Storage Classes, Storage Gateway, Snow Family, DataSync, Glacier
  8. Data Migration and Transfer: Application Discovery Service, DataSync, Database Migration Service, Server Migration Service,
  9. Data Replication: RDS, DynamoDB, S3, EC2, EC2 VM Import Connector, CloudFormation
  10. Data Protection: Direct Connect, VPC, Elastic Load Balancing, Route 53

There are two main measurements to consider when developing a disaster recovery plan:

  1. Recovery Point Objective (RPO): defines the acceptable maximum time interval (representing potential data loss) between creating recovery points.
  2. Recovery Time Objective (RTO): defines the acceptable maximum delay between the interruption and restoration of service.

AWS DR options can have an adverse impact on our overall public cloud costs. To learn more about it, check out this article in our brand-new Guide to AWS Cost Optimization.

See our AWS cost optimization tools in action. Request a demo today.

Cloud computing security compliance is one of the major reasons many organizations are hesitant to embrace a cloud-first strategy. At the same time, enterprise IT has now firmly established cloud computing as the new normal. 

The key to mitigating the security concerns in the cloud is for CIOs to invest in compliance. Here are the compliance best practices to help you take advantage of the cloud’s scalability and agility. 

Shared Security Responsibilities

Understand that both the vendor and the user have a shared responsibility for cloud security. When signing up with a cloud service provider, you must find out what aspects of cloud security it’s responsible for. You should also find out the aspects you need to take care of. 

Data Encryption

It is very important to properly protect data stored in the cloud. Make sure your provider supports data encryption for data moving to and from the cloud. Find out what encryption policies the vendor has put in place to safeguard against data breaches. 

The vendor should have detailed guidelines showing how it protects your data when stored on its servers. Do not migrate any data until you have gone through and understood these guidelines. 

Data Deletion Policies

Your organization may decide to change cloud providers or migrate to an on-premises deployment at some point. In some cases, you might need to delete customer data after your engagement with your provider ends. Whatever the case, you’ll need to establish the cloud provider’s policies concerning data deletion. 

Figure out how you can safely remove data from your system without compromising on security compliance. 

Access Control

After proper clearance, only authorized persons should access data stored in your cloud. As such, you should enact access control policies giving you oversight over users who try to access your cloud environment. With proper access control measures in place, you can assign specific rights to different users. That way, low-level users won’t have the same access rights as admins.   

Cloud Monitoring 

Traditional IT security focuses on defending against threats as they attack your systems. With the cloud, organizations have to take a more proactive approach toward cloud computing security compliance. You need to stop threats even before they take place. This is why it’s important to constantly monitor your cloud environment. You must take proactive steps to neutralize threats well in advance. 

Routine Penetration Tests

Cloud security should be preventative, not reactive. For this reason, it is important to regularly look at security gaps in your cloud infrastructure and close them. Failure to do so is leaving the door open for malicious actors to enter your cloud environment. 

Most cloud providers allow organizations to customize routine penetration tests to search for security gaps in their cloud deployments. Some providers do this themselves.  

Employee Training

One of the often-overlooked threat to cloud security is employees. An employee misusing your cloud environment because of negligence or ignorance can leave you vulnerable to attacks. It is important to train employees who’ll be using your cloud environment on cloud computing security compliance.

See how CloudBolt can help enhance your security tools for hybrid cloud.

Ready for the VMware vRealize Automation 8 migration? VMware vRealize Automation 8.0 (vRA 8) has brought with it many improvements and new capabilities. The new version will enhance the ability of organizations to manage and deploy multi-cloud environments.

Overview of the New Architecture

Today, everyone focuses on Kubernetes and containers. The focus of vRA 8 architecture is on container-based microservices. This architecture has significantly simplified the way organizations manage, configure, and upgrade the environment. 

Here’s what to expect:

Flexible Deployment

This time around, VMware has worked to improve the scalability, performance, and deployment options of vRA. Previous versions needed at least two VMs (virtual machines). You also needed to run portions of your architecture on a Windows server. VMware has dropped this requirement in version 8. 

In short:

Enhanced Integrations and Extensibility

Here are some highlights:

New HTML 5 User Interface

vRA 8.0 comes with a new HTML 5 interface and enhanced capabilities. 

Multi-Cloud Management

vRA 8.0 comes with improved support and seamless integration with native Amazon Web Services, VMware Cloud on AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. 

API-first Approach 

You get access to a powerful deployment and configuration API that allows organizations to automate interactions with vRA. The API also expands workflows, actions, integrations, and the art of possible scenarios to new levels. 

Ease the Setup and Consumption of Multi-Cloud

Cloud Zones and Projects simplify and enhance governance by reducing the number of actions and interfaces needed for configuration. They also unify governance across multiple clouds and give IT more control over where deployment happens. 

Iteratively Developing Blueprints

Blueprints is one of vRA’s core features. It gives organizations flexibility during the design and deployment of application, OS, and infrastructure resources. vRA 8.0 comes with new blueprints. They enable enterprises to add cloud-agnostic objects and allow for extended granularity. 

Cloud Agnostic Blueprints

You can use Cloud Assembly to create cloud-agnostic blueprints that provision infrastructure to a cloud of your choice. In addition, you can configure and deploy applications using cloud-init within the blueprint. 

Cloud-agnostic blueprints allow you to provision infrastructure and deploy applications to both public and private clouds without the need for additional configuration. 

Learn more about how CloudBolt can help you with your VMware instance.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud management can be challenging for organizations that are just starting. This is particularly so when it comes to adjusting to the cloud cost model. You see, on-premises applications come with a combination of fixed operating expenses and capital expenses. AWS, on the other hand, comes with variable operational expenses based on resources consumed.

The only way to overcome the cost variability challenges experienced in AWS is to avoid unnecessary costs. Organizations also need to set the right parameters. 

Common Causes of AWS Bill Sticker Shock

It’s normal to have some fluctuations in your monthly AWS bill because of changes in usage and other variables. If you’re not careful, you’ll make choices that might cause a spike in your AWS bill. 

Here’s a review of the common AWS cost mistakes you might be making. There are also some tips included on how to reduce the risk of exceeding your budget. 

Data transfers are one of the most common causes of AWS bill sticker shock. There’ll be no charge to transfer data into AWS. However, there’ll be a charge for transferring data from AWS to another service or region. 

You should design your AWS infrastructure with cost-effective and efficient data transfers in mind. If you’re constantly moving data from AWS to a private data center, then you should consider using AWS Direct Connect. Using AWS Direct Connect is the cheapest way to transfer data out of your AWS cloud. 

Guaranteed performance on AWS is very expensive – for both managed databases and block storage. If your organization needs guaranteed storage performance for the EC2 instances running critical applications, you should use Provisioned IOPS. But using IOPS can cause a spike in costs that easily exceed the capacity cost and even EC2 compute cost. 

Using DynamoDB can also deliver fast throughput, but you’ll have to use many Read/Write Capacity Units. AWS charges for each capacity unit. Therefore, you might want to keep an eye on the business value you’re getting from each unit. 

AWS Cloud Management – How to Tame Costs

You don’t have to suffer from sticker shock every time you get your AWS bill. There are some techniques and tools you can use to bring cloud costs under control. 

AWS Budgets can help organizations to keep track of their spending. You can find the tool in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. The tool is customizable, and you can set a threshold around cost and usage. You get an alert whenever you exceed the parameters you’ve set. 

AWS Budgets also comes with a forecasted cost mode. This notifies you when you’re consuming additional resources that might spike your cloud costs. This way, you can respond proactively rather than wait to receive a hefty bill.

Use AWS Cost Explorer to analyze your organization’s historical cloud spend and make a projection for the next three months. The tool lets you graph daily costs and gives rightsizing recommendations that allow you to lower costs without compromising on performance. 

Cost Explorer also gives you EC2 coverage and utilization reports. These let you plan for the use of EC2 Reserved Instances. EC2 Reserved Instances provide AWS users with a significant discount in exchange for a long-term commitment. 

If you’re too liberal with EC2 Auto Scaling and need to curb costs, you should limit scaling through your account. One of the key parameters for Auto Scaling is the maximum size. It limits both cost and performance for Auto Scaling groups.

You should prioritize cost over performance for applications that are not a core driver of business revenue.

Considering all aspects of cost for AWS is critical when you’ve selected it as a cloud computing provider. One area that is often the culprit for a growing AWS bill has to do with the accumulated cost of data transfers. Each services potentially involved in these transfers has different rates and stipulations, which can be challenging when it comes time to figure out costs.

An AWS Data Transfer occurs whenever data is moved either to the Internet from AWS or moved between AWS instances across their respective Regions or Availability Zones. Generally, inbound transfers are free; inter-Region and inter-Availablity Zone data transfers incur costs and are metered per Gigabyte.

A few years ago, it was calculated that the average business manages about 163TB of data. For enterprises, that figure is doubled. This 2019 article shows how some enterprises have spend shocking amounts of money just on AWS Data Transfers. In one example, it was found that Apple spent nearly $50 million on data transfers in 2017 alone. And for seven of the 10 biggest spenders in 2017, costs went up 50% in 2018.

As you can see, depending on the kind of data (such as video content, or data replication) and usage patterns of your users, data transfer costs can jump significantly overnight. Planning out the most efficient flow of your data is critical to staying within budget. Fortunately, there are several ways to reduce this cost if you first understand how AWS data transfer pricing works.

To learn more on this complex topic, this article in our new Guide to AWS Cost Optimization will help you navigate the intricacies of AWS Data Transfers and highlight some cost-effective strategies for routing your data.

See our AWS cost optimization tools in action. Request a demo today.