Moving to the cloud usually involves deploying workloads in both public and private clouds. It could also involve deploying to multiple public clouds. There’s a lot to consider when you’re thinking about purchasing a cloud governance platform.
There are five key areas of multi-cloud governance you must keep in mind. They are cost management, security and compliance, inventory, utilization, and automation and self-healing.
Cost Management
When virtualization made its way into data centers, virtual machine sprawl became the thing. It became easier to provision a virtual machine. As a result, people started leaving compute resources on longer than necessary.
This resulted in processes using far more resources than they needed. The industry soon came up with solutions to manage this problem. Cloud providers have customized tools to handle these issues. But the tools are far from perfect. One of the glaring shortcomings of these tools is the fact that they may not work across clouds.
Therefore, it’s still difficult to track how much you spend each month and who is responsible for any costs accrued. The only way out of this quagmire is to invest in a cloud governance platform that supports multiple clouds. Such a tool will enable you to view and govern resources across clouds.
Security and Compliance
Different cloud providers use different security measures to protect their resources. For example, Microsoft Azure uses network security groups. Google uses firewalls, and AWS uses NACLs and security groups.
The problem with these approaches is that none has a tool that can protect your whole multi-cloud environment.
Inventory
It can be difficult keeping track of applications in a single cloud. So, as a rule, you should tag all your resources as you deploy them to the cloud. Tagging allows you to categorize them individually and finally attach a cost to each of the resources.
Tagging also allows you to organize resources across different cloud service providers. This way, you’ll understand which resources you use for which projects and which personnel can use them.
Inventory management enables you to keep track of on-demand cloud resources. It might help uncover forgotten proof of concepts or even resources of projects that you no longer need.
Utilization
Most organizations move to the cloud because of the flexible pay-as-you-go billing model. This model allows them to pay for only what they use. A cloud governance platform can help log data from your workloads to understand what resources your applications are using.
The right tool can even show the ideal placement of your resources across the cloud to optimize cost and performance.
Automation and Self-Healing
You may have the best DevOps professionals on your team. However, there’s only so much they can do to keep everything ticking. You can make their work easier by implementing automation and self-healing.
A good example of this is when your instances are experiencing an increased load. You would normally scale the instances to meet the demand. But in a multi-cloud environment, you rarely have a way out. A cloud governance platform, such as CloudBolt, can react to cross-cloud events and implement remedial measures.
