Eric Knorr, CIO<\/a><\/p>\nIn June 2020, CIO held its first CIO Think Tank, a series of virtual roundtables that brought together 30 IT leaders to unpack one of the most important issues in enterprise technology today: managing multiple clouds. The roundtables also featured IDC Research Director Deepak Mohan, IDG B2B Editor-in-Chief Eric Knorr, and cloud executives Deepak Patil and Bradd Lewis from Dell Technologies.<\/p>\n
The objective of these discussions was to identify the key challenges associated with multi-cloud management and to offer a roadmap for IT leadership \u2014 as well as the technology industry \u2014 to overcome those obstacles. All participants drew on their own experience and knowledge to describe strategic and tactical approaches to selecting, provisioning, and maintaining multiple clouds for maximum business and IT benefit.<\/p>\n
Multi-cloud is so new and evolving so quickly that the panel participants were not in universal agreement about its definition. Yet a consensus emerged: Multi-cloud has evolved to embrace not just multiple public IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) clouds, but also private, on-premises clouds. The only substantive disagreement was whether SaaS (software a service) should also be included; most thought it should be.<\/p>\n
All 30 participating IT leaders were in the financial industry, where security, availability, and regulatory compliance are paramount. With the intent of providing guidance amid constant cloud flux, this report captures and consolidates the thinking of forward-looking IT leaders in a complex multi-cloud world.<\/p>\n
Multi-cloud challenge No. 1: Governance<\/h1>\n
Every experienced IT leader knows what it\u2019s like to manage disparate systems and platforms. But dealing with multiple clouds \u2014 particularly those that include a broad range of PaaS functionality \u2014 raises the ante, because they are essentially vast ecosystems of services. Developers and\/or lines of business within organizations have been known to go off on their own to build cloud applications or consume public cloud services without IT\u2019s knowledge, let alone blessing. \u201cI hate to use the word governance, because I know that has a negative connotation,\u201d said Ryan Brown, chief enterprise architect for cloud at Visa. \u201cI\u2019m not saying to put handcuffs on my developers if they say something new is great in Cloud XYZ, but we need to have some guardrails.\u201d \u201cLook, \u2018governance\u2019 is the right word, but we\u2019ve also got to play that up against agility,\u201d added Aon\u2019s Putcha. \u201cI did try, to be honest, to be very heavy handed and governance oriented, and we just didn\u2019t move fast, because then we have 20 people with an opinion and a decision by committee, and absolutely nothing took place.\u201d That clampdown was in response to \u201cpeople going off on their own,\u201d which led to wasted money and effort along with the risk of exposing data in unmanaged cloud ecosystems. Today, Putcha has taken a middle path: policy-driven, self-service automation. \u201cYou get to do whatever you want within this space, but we limit the blast radius,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s good governance and bad governance,\u201d said Richard Wiedenbeck, CIO at the insurance company Ameritas, who, like Brown, prefers to avoid the G-word due to its \u201cnegative connotations.\u201d Instead, he said, \u201cWe have a sign we put up that says, \u2018We want to make well-informed, thoughtful and purposeful decisions about technology balancing cost, risk and value.\u2019 That\u2019s a mantra for everybody. It can\u2019t be, \u2018I just want my thing.\u2019”<\/p>\n
Multi-cloud challenge No. 2: Interoperability<\/h1>\n
Every cloud has its own way of doing things, resulting in a lack of interoperability that was problematic for most of the roundtable participants. Eddie Contreras, chief information security officer and executive vice president at Frost Bank, lamented that \u201cyou get these really good vendors, and they have some really good development platforms, but they don\u2019t work well with others.\u201d Sankara Ramakrishnan, principal architect at MetLife, agreed: \u201cIf you want to move from one vendor\u2019s platform with a capability to another vendor\u2019s platform \u2026 you virtually have to rewrite those applications.\u201d Likewise, FINRA Chief Information Officer Steve Randich has a substantial investment in an AWS analytics implementation that, for practical purposes, can\u2019t move anywhere else. \u201cIt would be very difficult for us to take all of our big data processing and 200 petabytes of data and move it over to Azure without major re-architectures and major re-automation and rebuilding our security infrastructure, among many other things,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is a lack of standardization today,\u201d asserted Fiserv\u2019s Singh. \u201cI think we all feel and see that. A workload running in an X manner on one cloud platform will run in a different manner on another. If you had standards, that would obviously be a propellant for anybody to get ready to embark on this journey of multi-cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n
For more on how to reap\u00a0unprecedented benefits through these unprecedented times, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\nAbout the author(s)<\/strong><\/p>\nEric Knorr is the Editor in Chief of IDG Enterprise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How can enterprises handle the complexity of multiple clouds? 30 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":27467,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,53],"tags":[99,1385,4057,2306,4059,14,4058],"class_list":["post-27466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-innovation-business","category-opinion","tag-ceo","tag-ceo-northam","tag-cio","tag-cloud","tag-cloud-management","tag-innovation","tag-it"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27468,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27466\/revisions\/27468"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}