There is no doubt we now live in a hybrid, multi-cloud world. Eighty-one percent of enterprises now employ a multi-cloud strategy, with organizations using an average of five different clouds concurrently.
There are a multitude of vendors with a myriad of different clouds today. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; developers and IT departments have more options than ever before regarding what clouds they want to work with. But this abundance of choice can be a double-edged sword: with great choices comes great complexity.
Now that IT departments no longer have the final say regarding which applications people across the organization will use, or what they have access to, enterprise technology can get complicated, fast. The pressure to innovate faster causes individual business units within organizations to employ self-service resources rather than going through the central IT department. When this happens, shadow IT can proliferate across the organization.
For example, marketing might set up a contract with Basecamp while sales decides to use HubSpot. This can result in organizations becoming bogged down with too many moving parts, things that don’t work well together (or just plain don’t work), and users getting frustrated when resources aren’t available when they need them. And at the end of the day, the responsibility for simplifying things still falls on IT.
Simplifying Cloud Complexity
In this evolving world of unprecedented choice, how can IT simplify this growing complexity while fostering a self-service culture that enables agility and rapid innovation? The best way is to make things simple from the beginning.
Organizations shouldn’t have to bend over backwards every time a user or department wants to incorporate a new cloud-based tool into their operations. Anyone can utilize AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, but each of these tools has their own individual portal that developers need to learn to navigate.
In order to swiftly adopt and incorporate new technologies and cultivate innovation in a way that doesn’t create complexity and confusion, modern IT leaders leverage centralized, self-service provisioning platforms. These tools empower users with easily obtainable cloud resources while significantly reducing the back-and-forth between IT and end users. With the right hybrid cloud management platform, IT can simply set up a self-service catalog for developers to go through, and no one has to deal with trying to navigate multiple cloud portals.
The 4 Capabilities of a Hybrid Cloud Management Platform
The right hybrid cloud management platform should be able to:
- Provision and orchestrate resources to a full range of legacy infrastructure, private data centers and public clouds
- Provide as much or as little control as necessary to end users, depending on their status and level of expertise
- Include built-in support for access to the most commonly used IT resources as well as the extensibility to use the same framework to connect to any resource for any workload
- Customize the user experience and user interface (UI) with the most relevant views that meet the needs of end users
A consumable, easy-to-use platform is a must when managing multiple public and private cloud instances. You have enough headaches to deal with in IT; managing and orchestrating your cloud resources shouldn’t be one of them.
