A few words about the challenges in the IT cloud

The growth and popularization of cloud solutions has brought a significant change in the way of thinking about computer infrastructure in all modern and information processing-oriented enterprises. The public cloud offers access to gigantic resources with simple, single operations.

Currently, in a matter of seconds, a user with the appropriate permissions can run dozens, hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines, containers, or reserve resources for other services, such as batch processing or object-based storage.

Due to the enormous possibilities of cloud solutions, managing only a single cloud creates many natural challenges, including:

  • the need to train the team in the use of a given cloud platform
  • the need to monitor services, often using platform-specific tools
  • the need to monitor costs, the calculation of which is often not possible in a simple way.

Advantages and Challenges of Multicloud Environments

In many organizations, the environment at our disposal consists (or in the near future will consist) of a large number of services from various cloud providers. We are then talking about the so-called ‘multicloud.’ Multicloud environments have many advantages, and the main ones include:

  • no risk of limiting the organization to one solution (vendor lock-in) and, consequently, no risk of remaining a financial and technological ‘hostage’ of one supplier
  • redundancy – in the event of failure of one of the suppliers, we retain the possibility of dynamic transfer of the load to another service provider
  • cost optimization – thanks to the possibility of selecting individual services from different suppliers, we can easily adapt to real needs, while flexibly managing costs. In addition, organizations using a multicloud environment are much more effective in price negotiations with cloud service providers
  • higher performance – contrary to the popular opinion about the equivalence of solutions, the same services in individual cloud environments can achieve significantly different performance at a given price. A multicloud environment enables even deeper optimization of performance in this regard
  • target location – individual cloud services are usually located in different geographic locations than their users. This situation can be accompanied by undesirable time delays, which is a particular nuisance when quick interaction with the systems is crucial. Having a multicloud environment enables more flexible adaptation to technological requirements in this area
  • differences in the ways of accessing the indicated functionalities – e.g. different clouds differently support access to nested virtualization. The multicloud environment allows us to use the optimal solution for a frequently specific task.

Some of the challenges that organizations face in multi-cloud environments arise directly from the imperfections of the cloud environments themselves. Using multicloud deepens some of these difficulties. Others are the result of using many different solutions simultaneously. Among the typical challenges are:

  • the need to train the team in the use of many different, often very advanced cloud platforms (AWS alone has 175 different services and products - as of July 1, 2020)
  • the need to monitor services, often with multiple tools and methods available on different platforms
  • the need to monitor costs on many platforms, the calculation of which is often impossible, because the price lists of cloud providers are usually intricate, and the multitude of price lists and vendors additionally complicates this process
  • most cloud service providers have different, incompatible authentication and authorization methods.

As if that were not enough, some organizations use yet another model of services, the so-called hybrid cloud, which additionally naturally complements them or is a specific subset of multicloud environments.

Hybrid Cloud

What is a hybrid cloud?

Hybrid cloud is an extension of the idea of multi-cloud environments. Most users understand it as a combination of public and private clouds (hence its hybrid nature). It also happens that when we talk about a hybrid cloud, we mean simply using the services of two cloud providers (regardless of whether public or private).

On the one hand, a hybrid cloud can naturally complement a multicloud environment, e.g. when particularly sensitive services or data are in a private cloud, while the publicly available part of the organization's activity is located in the public cloud. On the other hand, having a hybrid cloud makes it possible to optimize expenses by flexibly moving resources from public to private cloud (or vice versa), depending on the maintenance costs in individual environments.

Smart Cloud Management – EuroIQ

As one can see, managing multicloud environments is simply complex and difficult. From the user's point of view, an ideal solution would be the ‘manager of managers’ of individual cloud environments. And that's what EuroIQ is. The main task of this product is to simplify the management of multicloud environments whether public, private or hybrid. This is achieved by the central console, which in the graphic mode enables, among other things:

  • integration of multiple cloud environments using a centralized solution
  • collecting information on the use, monitoring, performance and broadly understood analytics of cloud services
  • ensuring greater security, setting policies for users or configuration management
  • task automation, provisioning or container orchestration.

More information about the advantages and possibilities of this product can be found in the following EuroIQ tabs.