If the shift to the cloud promised freedom then the multi-cloud revolution offered flexibility — the ability to put the right workload in the right place at the right time. But that promised flexibility has come with a lot of caveats and a lot of headaches, experts from IBM and Kyndryl told Silverlinings. Now, the race is on to solve for the problems that have begun plaguing enterprises in the multi-cloud world.
According to Deloitte, as many as 85% of businesses are using two or more clouds and a quarter are using five or more. This might sound great in theory — more clouds equals more processing power, more redundancy and better pricing — but managing such an environment is a nightmare.
Anthony Dasari, VP in Kyndryl’s Cloud practice, told Silverlinings that’s because each cloud’s foundation (also known as a landing zone) is built differently. That means everything from account structures, metering and pricing to security setups, account hierarchies and information visibility is unique to each. At a practical level, the result is that a worker’s skills on one platform aren’t fully transferable and it is nearly impossible to manually implement the exact same policies across every cloud.
Landing zones are the foundation on top of which enterprises deploy workloads. What some clients have done, Dasari said, is turn to Kubernetes-based containers to create an abstraction layer and make workloads more easily transferable across clouds. But that doesn’t solve the underlying problem of variable landing zones.
“What happens with that is you can abstract away all the differentiation when it comes to workload, but you still can’t abstract away the landing zone design,” Dasari said.
He continued: “Our clientele has a very hybrid multi-cloud environment. They have a traditional footprint, a private cloud footprint…and they have a public cloud footprint. The biggest problem that comes to us is how do I get consistency of experience from a whole IT lifecycle perspective…That’s what they’re pushing us to do.”
Sneaky siloes
The problems with multi-cloud don’t just live in the cloud itself — they also reside in siloed enterprises. Stephen Rose, GM of IBM’s TMT business, told Silverlinings businesses face three main problems when it comes to operating in a multi-cloud world: technical barriers, financial barriers and human barriers.
Technical barriers include increasing complexity of service chains between departments and the persistence of manual processes to connect different cloud systems. For instance, developer teams may have to manually ask cloud ops teams to create the necessary connectivity for a new app or workload. The cloud ops team then has to go to the security team to ensure the right holes are poked in the firewall to enable the app or workload to run. And then they can go back and let the developers know they’re all clear to deploy. All of this communication is perhaps done by email or over a messaging platform like Slack rather than being automated.
“There is this ping-pong between two different organizations, which the only way that they really manage it is through highly laborious and manual processes,” he said. This is true for “most” firms today, Rose said.
Enterprises also face poor observability and security risks because different clouds have different KPIs, SLAs and security protocols, he added.
On a related note, human hurdles arise when different business units have unclear roles when it comes to the cloud. There can be confusion around who has access to what, creating a “CISO nightmare.”
And finally, in terms of finances, Rose noted that it’s hard for enterprises to get a grip on multi-cloud costs because there usually isn’t a single budget line item for “cloud costs.” Instead, these are rolled usually rolled into operating expenses.
With enterprises unlikely to backtrack on multi-cloud strategies, Dasari and Rose said there’s only one way forward. IBM and Kyndryl are each trying to solve for multi-cloud issues in their own way, the former with its hybrid cloud mesh solution and the latter with its multi-cloud management platform.
At the end of the day, though, Rose said any winning solution has to address the two biggest items on the enterprise checklist: cost management and security.