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Today's datacenter managers are tasked with providing the underlying computational, networking, and storage infrastructure necessary to support a wide array of business services and applications for internal and external users. All of this must be provided in a highly secure and reliable manner.

Computing resources are no longer defined by the capabilities provided solely by on-premise datacenters; they also encompass public cloud services provided by well-known organizations like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. (Note: A “private” cloud, as its name suggests, is a cloud computing environment devoted to the sole use of a single organization. They are most commonly deployed among today’s large enterprise organizations but are also found in smaller entities.)

Datacenter managers are adopting innovative approaches to combine the best attributes of traditional datacenters plus the undeniable fast deployment and almost unlimited scalability benefits associated with cloud computing services. The best known is the hybrid multi-cloud platform, which is a combination of on-premises, private, and public cloud environments.

Hybrid multi-clouds enable organizations to distribute computing workloads across any number of multiple cloud services, while also allocating selected data and applications to their own datacenter facilities. This way, they can take advantage of the unique features and benefits of different cloud services while reserving on-premise resources for sensitive data or workloads that demand exceptionally low latency.

Implementing a robust and cost-efficient hybrid multi-cloud strategy presents a range of challenges for datacenter managers. Here to engage in Q&A regarding these issues is Derive Technologies’ Heman Yung, Practice Lead in Datacenter and Hybrid Cloud. Heman has architected and implemented various datacenter solutions ranging from virtualization, compute and storage platform configurations, hyperconverged implementations, and backup and recovery solutions, including disaster recovery.

Needs Assessments

Q: No two companies are alike, and obviously, their computing needs and requirements vary enormously. How does Derive Technologies go about helping companies make intelligent assessments of their cloud computing requirements, and assemble a coherent hybrid multi-cloud strategy?

We work closely with our clients to understand both their business needs and the operational challenges they may currently be facing. With knowledge of a client’s pain points, we help guide them towards one or more solutions best suited to address them. Derive helps our customers to understand the journey to hybrid and multi-cloud, and its inherent operational implications—as well as take that journey with them.

With cloud services, the IT spend shifts from CapEx to OpEx, and understanding the financial costs required to transition and to maintain such services is paramount. Derive offers a cloud migration assessment where we evaluate the client’s existing workloads, model those workloads to fit appropriate instances, and forecast those operational costs.

In terms of understanding our clients’ technical needs, we evaluate the existing infrastructure to determine their cloud integration readiness. For workloads and applications, Derive helps evaluate supportability in the cloud, performance needs, latency requirements, as well as application adjacency and dependencies. Derive provides requirements and recommendations to effectively integrate cloud service providers into a client’s environment by extending on-premise networks into cloud providers. We analyze and determine optimal positioning for applications to ensure the transition and end-user experience is seamless. Derive Technologies’ wide diversity of IT infrastructure subject matter experts in many key areas helps clients adopt a successful and robust hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategy.

Data Management

Q: Managing data across multiple cloud platforms and a local datacenter is obviously complex. And ensuring data integrity and availability is crucial and challenging. Please shed some light on this topic.

Happy to do so. One of the main concerns for organizational administrators is the added complexity along with additional layers of management from an operations and maintenance perspective. We keep this concern top-of-mind when designing any solution for our customers. We want to make it easier—not harder—for our fellow IT technologists and admins. Today, there are several offerings that provide that “single pane of glass” for managing your multi-cloud environments, from on-premise infrastructure to public cloud providers such as Azure and AWS.

Application mobility has also improved tremendously. No longer does it take days to migrate workloads between datacenters. Now, it can be accomplished within minutes. AI, machine learning, and analytics tools are also used in guiding us in making better decisions, such as automated provisioning of workloads to meet performance, capacity, and application SLA requirements.

Security and Compliance

Q: What are some concerns to keep top of mind?

This is a very complex and wide-ranging topic, and will require another in-depth article to discuss this topic adequately. But in general, protecting sensitive data and meeting regulatory compliance becomes increasingly complex in a multi-cloud environment. Each cloud provider and the on-premises datacenter may well have quite different security protocols, making overall security management much more challenging. At Derive, several of our several of our IT security architects are focused on ensuring these issues are properly “baked in” to all of our implemented solutions.

Overarching Concerns

Q: What are the top concerns datacenter managers confront when implementing a hybrid multi-cloud solution?

Here’s my top five list…

1. Interoperability – achieving seamless integration between different cloud platforms and the on-premises datacenter is a major challenge. Despite some substantial progress on several fronts, the lack of standardization between different cloud providers can result in compatibility issues.
2. Cost Management – while hybrid multi-cloud environments can be cost-effective, they can also lead to major cost overruns if not managed carefully. Keeping track of different cloud service pricing models, managing resources efficiently, and avoiding unnecessary costs can be quite challenging.
3. Performance Optimization – optimizing the performance of applications that run across multiple cloud environments can be tricky and time-consuming. Excessive network latencies and data transfer costs can substantially impact the performance and cost of applications.
4. Skill Gaps – implementing a hybrid multi-cloud strategy often requires specialized skills and knowledge, which your current IT team might not possess. Training staff or hiring new talent to manage hybrid multi-cloud environments can be a significant challenge.
5. Vendor Lock-in – despite one of the purposes of a multi-cloud strategy being to avoid vendor lock-in, it's still easy to become overly dependent on a particular provider's tools and services, leading to potential issues if you need to transition away.

In Summary

All the challenges mentioned in this article can be solved with careful planning, regular monitoring, adequate staff training, and specialized software tools designed for managing hybrid multi-cloud environments. It's also important to work closely with cloud service providers and potentially enlist the help of consultants or managed service providers.