As cloud hyperscalers become an increasingly integral part of enterprise IT, more government agencies are adopting a multicloud approach by integrating two or more cloud environments to support their IT operations.
Agencies can choose vendors they already know, but there may be strategic reasons for why a particular cloud environment might be the best fit. For instance, a cloud vendor might have specific partnerships that make it an obvious choice for certain workloads.
Whatever factors lead an organization toward a multicloud approach, IT and business leaders need to ensure their environments are in optimal shape. Here are some areas to monitor:
1. Track the Cost of Multicloud Environments
Too many leaders assumed that the cloud would be less expensive than on-premises environments, and often they simply performed a “lift and shift” of their resources, failing to redesign their workloads for the cloud. The same thing can happen when organizations embrace a multicloud approach: Costs can quickly get out of control.
Cloud vendors have native tools to help organizations monitor and manage costs. Value-added partners can help organizations generate predictive cost models and alert stakeholders of potential cost increases.
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2. Ensure Fast Access to Data Across Cloud Providers
The top concern for any agency with a multicloud environment should be managing workloads so they are always fully available and offer a high level of performance. If a given program uses data from different clouds, network latency can create lags that negatively impact the user experience.
Here again, organizations can benefit from working with a trusted partner to help. In a managed services model, a partner handles the day-to-day management of cloud-based services and technical support, freeing up internal IT staff to tackle more strategic initiatives.
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3. Limit User Access for Enhanced Security
Security problems can pop up quickly in a multicloud environment if agencies do not adopt guidelines to govern who can access given resources, and how. As a rule, organizations should follow the principle of least privilege, granting users access only to the data and systems that they need to do their jobs. This doesn’t mean that organizations should toss up roadblocks that prevent employees from being productive. But it does mean that data — especially highly regulated or otherwise sensitive data — shouldn’t be easily accessible to people who don’t need it.
