Hybrid and multi-cloud environments are often chosen because they offer flexibility, resilience, compliance capabilities, and opportunities for optimization and innovation for modern businesses. According to a report published by Enterprise Strategy Group in 2023, the majority of organizations use multiple on-premises data centers, colocation providers, and Platform as a Service (PaaS)/Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers to power their IT infrastructure. A staggering 85% of organizations use two or more IaaS providers, making the need for cloud synchronization and effective management tools stronger than ever.
Today’s largest cloud providers include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. These providers offer similar basic services, such as VMs, platform-like databases, file shares, and serverless computing, but their areas of specialization differ slightly:
- AWS’s global reach is one of its biggest strengths.
- Microsoft excels in security and compliance and offers Windows-based VMs for those heavily invested in the Microsoft Ecosystem.
- Google Cloud provides powerful data and analytics tools, making the platform popular for machine learning use cases.
Each of these platforms also provides native data protection applications which are tailored to each platforms’ offerings. However, in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, these free offerings create a burden on management in the form of complexity and cost. In addition, this complexity can reduce the resiliency of multi-cloud production environments.
This guide explores the importance of multi-cloud management and resilience protection and lays out some best practices for synchronizing services across cloud platforms .
Understanding Hybrid vs. Multi-Cloud Management
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments are two slightly different approaches to cloud computing. Hybrid cloud deployments blend on-premises data center infrastructure with a public or private cloud. Hybrid clouds are relatively simple blending on-premises assets with only a single type of hosted cloud.
In contrast, multi-cloud deployments use different clouds of the same type, such as having a presence on both AWS and Azure. An organization can have an infrastructure that’s both hybrid and multi-cloud at the same time.
Keeping data synchronized across multiple cloud platforms can be challenging, but it’s essential to ensure all environments have access to up-to-date information.
Multi-Cloud Management: The Case for a Unified Approach
Multi-cloud approaches offer several benefits, such as resilience, more efficient distribution of workloads, and avoidance of vendor lock-in. However, multi-cloud environments are more complex, presenting new challenges in cost management and security.
According to the 2024 Virtana State of Multi-Cloud Management Report, which surveyed 350 IT leaders in the U.S. and UK, 44% are concerned with keeping rising costs under control, and 40% are challenged with staying optimized/rightsized on an ongoing basis.
A unified approach to multi-cloud management helps address these issues by simplifying operations across cloud infrastructures. Potential ways to reduce the rising costs and managing systems across vendors include:
- Cloud management tools: Terraform, Morpheus, and Flexera CMP can help manage cloud solutions across multiple vendors.
- API-based management tools: Automate cloud management using APIs for performance monitoring and provisioning.
- Multi-cloud management platforms: Third-party multi-cloud management platforms offer a unified interface to manage different cloud environments, simplifying cloud resource management and monitoring.
Syncing AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud: A Step-By-Step Guide
When using multiple cloud platforms, it’s vital to properly synchronize data and workloads. Careful planning keeps latency as low as possible and minimizes data transfer costs when syncing between clouds.
How you manage workloads will depend on the goals driving your multi-cloud approach. For example, you might aim for multiple redundant deployments spread across different providers or choose to deploy your workloads on the platform best suited to each.
- In the former case, running user-facing services on both AWS and Google Cloud platforms serving numerous territories might make the most sense. In the latter, you might decide to run data processing or machine learning workloads on Azure or Google Cloud.
To minimize vendor lock-in:
- Use containerization: Deploying workloads in containers increases portability by adding a layer of abstraction between the applications and the OS/hardware they’re running on.
- Choose open formats: Avoid proprietary tools. Base your stack on open-source solutions, use MySQL, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL for database solutions, and choose Jenkins for DevOps tooling and Kubernetes for scaling and deployment.
- Use abstraction layers to interface with proprietary systems: If a cloud service provider uses proprietary systems for a task such as logging, create a library to interface with that system. If you need to move to another provider, you’ll only need to change that library, simplifying the transition.
- Adopt Container Orchestration and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools: Automate the provisioning of cloud resources with IaC and container orchestration solutions to reduce the risk of human error and ensure more accurate provisioning of containers and infrastructure.
Leverage Multi-Cloud Management in a Hybrid Cloud Environment
Hybrid multi-cloud environments are commonplace, as many organizations have legacy workloads hosted on-premises or choose to keep some workloads in their data centers or on a private cloud for compliance reasons.
Some common use cases for hybrid multi-cloud environments include using cloud services for machine learning or distributed data processing or as a solution for backups and disaster recovery. Some organizations also use hybrid cloud solutions for cloud bursting, running their services on-premises some of the time and bursting compute capacity through Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or other cloud services as required.
Hybrid multi-cloud environments offer several potential benefits. Organizations can take advantage of the scalability and flexibility of the public cloud and the comparatively low cost of computing resources the public cloud offers. They maintain control over their on-premises data centers and enjoy the confidence of knowing certain critical workloads are isolated or running in hardened, regulatory-compliant environments.
To maintain the benefits of this approach, it’s essential to carefully plan the infrastructure and take a systematic approach to bridging data between private/on-premises and public cloud workloads. Some things to consider include:
- Networking: Plan the network in a way that minimizes data transfer costs and allows for load balancing while maintaining proper security for sensitive services. Use VPNs for secure communication.
- Monitoring, logging, and security: Use multi-cloud manager systems to monitor the performance of all services to check for downtime or performance issues and alert you to potential security-related events.
- Access control: Carefully configure Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems. Follow the principle of least privilege to ensure any logins or keys people or scripts use can only access what they need to perform their jobs.
- Data protection and backups: Configure automated backups and properly encrypt and store them according to data protection regulations. Ideally, one of these backups should be immutable, air-gapped, and off-site.
Deploy Cross-Cloud Platforms & Tools for Seamless Multi-Cloud Management
Many tools are available to help with container orchestration, resource provisioning, and cloud management. Some popular tools include:
- Kubernetes: Also known as K8s, Kubernetes is an open-source platform for automating container management. It’s highly customized and scalable and can be deployed in a range of environments. K8s has a limited UI for managing cloud instances, but many of its more powerful features require command-line usage.
- OpenShift: This enterprise-grade application platform includes support for Kubernetes and many other features. You can use it with all major cloud service providers, and it has a relatively powerful GUI.
- Terraform: Operating at a different level of abstraction to Kubernetes and OpenShift, Terraform is an IaC tool that automates the creation and provisioning of computing resources. IaC solutions, such as Terraform, ensure transparency, efficiency, and repeatability by allowing automatic resource provisioning through scripts.
With the Right Platforms and Tools in Place, Challenges Still Exist
While a properly deployed multi-cloud offers a range of benefits, it also presents challenges:
- Visibility: Monitoring costs, resource usage, and security alerts across multiple cloud platforms can be difficult. Unified dashboards bring all the information IT managers need together in one simple view.
- Cost management: It’s easy for runaway processes or forgotten instances to continue racking up bills when you have services running on multiple platforms. You can mitigate this risk by using cloud management software to monitor resource usage and following standard cloud best practices to set alerts or cost management systems on each platform.
- Compliance: Major cloud services providers offer dedicated solutions to comply with regulatory requirements, such as government or military cloud solutions and storage that meets GDPR, HIPAA, and other regulatory requirements. These may be separate products. Organizations that need to meet such requirements must plan their workloads carefully to ensure they’re deployed to the right private/hardened clouds.
- Data protection and backups: When protecting and securing data in a multi-cloud environment, consider the toolchain, workflow, and portability of data between clouds (e.g., backing up AWS to Azure, restoring Google Cloud to AWS, etc.).
Case Studies: Successful Multi-Cloud Management
Multi-cloud environments are used in many industries, from finance to entertainment. One example of a successful multi-cloud deployment is Provident Mexico, a personal loan provider that transitioned to multi-cloud to improve the efficiency and reliability of its IT environments.
The company had a mixture of virtualized infrastructure on-premises and cloud services, and its infrastructure was complex, amounting to around 300 servers. By using cloud management solutions to get a unified view of all its workloads, it was able to streamline its IT management and reduce the time it took to deploy applications to production by almost 75%.
Another successful hybrid cloud deployment example is Clarke University, which used Veeam+Wasabi as part of a high-performance hybrid cloud system for immutable data backups. Setting up the solution was simple, and it integrated quickly with the rest of the system. The university benefited from high-speed, secure backups while simultaneously reducing data egress fees for backing up its data.
Future Trends: The Evolution of Multi-Cloud Management
Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud adoption is continuing to grow. Edge computing is becoming increasingly popular, and multi-cloud deployments are an important part of edge-to-cloud connectivity as organizations look to deploy workloads to cloud data centers as close as possible to their IoT devices.
As hybrid and multi-cloud adoption expands, we’ll likely see increasing adoption of AI and machine learning tools to help automate cloud services. Nigel Gibbons, director and senior advisor at NCC Group, discusses a trend toward “more intelligent, self-managing hybrid cloud systems that can predict and adapt to the increased velocity of changing needs.”
The day of the self-managing data center isn’t here yet, but cloud management solutions are improving rapidly.
Embrace Benefits of the Hybrid Multi-Cloud
Hybrid multi-cloud solutions offer numerous potential benefits for organizations of all sizes. They unlock the cost-saving and scalability benefits of the public cloud while allowing organizations to keep legacy or sensitive workloads within their own data centers or on a private cloud.
Choosing a good cloud management platform and planning an integrated multi-cloud management approach saves time and reduces the risk of runaway costs and security and data protection issues.
Optimize your Cloud Strategy with Veeam, and discover how Veeam’s powerful backup and recovery solutions can empower your multi-cloud environment. Whether you’re looking for self-managed backup solutions or fully managed backup as a service through Veeam-powered partners, let us help you remove the complexity of data protection.
Get our Hybrid Cloud Backup Guide for more insights on hybrid and multi-cloud backup.
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