Are you looking for a multi-cloud governance platform? Multi-cloud architectures are now mainstream. Sure, they have made IT more complex. But they’ve also brought a world of opportunity for delivering value to the modern-day enterprise.
Unfortunately, not many organizations have the skills required to manage multi-cloud deployments. Likewise, they don’t know how to assemble the right tools to facilitate proper management. You see, with the right tools, multi-cloud becomes much easier to take. Today we’re going to go over the process of choosing a governance platform for the multi-cloud.
Multi-Cloud Governance Platform Features
Now you understand what the challenges of the multi-cloud are. So let’s take a look at the process you need to go through to choose and implement multi-cloud governance tools. It would help if you established what features are important for your organization before embarking on this journey. Consider the following:
Service Provisioning
This refers to the ability to launch cloud services and allocate the resources needed to support the service. This tool helps to translate provisioning requests from an API or the console. It converts the requests into the cloud-native API.
Service Monitoring
This refers to the ability to monitor multi-cloud services as they run. It helps to determine how they’re behaving against the set policy. Service monitoring includes reporting on occurrences to determine how you will use the service in the future. It reports on cost metrics, reliability, and other key indices.
Service Performance
You want a multi-cloud governance platform that allows you to monitor service performance and store logs of the results. This allows you to blacklist poor-performing services until you have solved all the performance issues.
Service Governance/Policy
This is the ability to leverage and define policies regarding the use and execution of cloud services.
Service Orchestration
This is the ability of the cloud governance platform to orchestrate cloud services to meet the needs of business processes and applications.
Monitoring analytics
This gives you a detailed analysis of the cloud’s behavior, key metrics, and future behavior predictions, such as reliability and performance.
Integration with security
The cloud governance tools should be able to operate with the existing security infrastructure. Most times, this will deal with identity access management, but it could also touch on compliance.
These are the core features you need to look out for. But this list isn’t exhaustive and may vary based on the unique needs of your organization.
The Process of Implementing a Multi-Cloud Governance Platform
The process of implementing a multi-cloud governance platform looks like this:
Step 1: Define the cloud architecture – This includes any services leveraged in the multi-cloud.
Step 2: Come up with a catalog of services – This is where you define the metadata of services so you can discover, find, and use them.
Step 3: Define the performance expectations – Consider the operations, security, and other factors you need to understand before choosing a tool.
Step 4: Pick out several tools– Narrow down your options to several tools that meet the criteria you came up with.
Step 5: Evaluate the Tools – Do a trial run with the tools you selected and pick some based on the outcomes.
Step 6: Do acceptance testing
Step 7: Come up with a process for re-evaluating the tools periodically – You must keep checking whether the tools continue to meet your needs as the organization grows.
