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Multi-Cloud Management

Managing multiple clouds involves coordinating and optimizing the use of various public cloud services from different providers. It includes monitoring performance, ensuring security and compliance, managing costs, and automating workflows across these environments. The goal of implementing a multi-cloud management strategy is to leverage the strengths of each cloud service while minimizing complexity and costs and maintaining consistent governance.

What is Multi-Cloud Management?

Multicloud management tackles managing IT across different places. This includes public clouds (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), private clouds, and even a company’s own data center. It uses tools and strategies to make it all work together. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud services, many choose to use a mix of public, private, and hybrid clouds from various vendors to avoid vendor lock-in, optimize costs, and leverage the best features from each provider.

How does multi-cloud management work?

The goal of multicloud management is to provide a centralized way to manage disparate environments, simplifying administration and ensuring everything runs smoothly.

Key aspects of multicloud management include:

  • Centralized visibility and control: A single interface to monitor and manage all your cloud resources.
  • Automation: Automate routine tasks to save time and reduce errors.
  • Security: Enforce consistent security policies across all your clouds.
  • Cost management: Track and optimize cloud spending.
  • Workload portability: Easily move workloads between clouds as needed.

What are the Benefits of Multi-Cloud Management?

Organizations are continually adopting multicloud strategies to benefit from:

  • Flexibility: Choose the best cloud service for each specific task, need, and workload based on factors like cost, features, and security.
  • Resilience: Using multiple cloud providers reduces the risk of downtime and enhances disaster recovery capabilities.
  • Cost optimization: Take advantage of competitive pricing plans and discounts offered by different providers. Avoid vendor lock-in and dependence on a single cloud provider, leading to potential cost savings.
  • Scalability: Resources can be scaled across different clouds to meet varying demands, ensuring optimal performance and availability.
  • Enhanced Innovation: Access to diverse tools and services from multiple providers fosters innovation and the ability to adopt new technologies quickly.

What is the difference between multi-cloud management and hybrid cloud management?

Multi-cloud management focuses on leveraging multiple public cloud providers, while hybrid cloud management combines on-premises infrastructure with public cloud services to create a unified environment.

Multi-cloud Management:

  • Definition: Uses multiple cloud services from different public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.
  • Purpose: Avoid vendor lock-in, leverage the strengths of different cloud providers, and increase redundancy and resilience.
  • Usage: Each cloud may be used for different applications or services, depending on the strengths and offerings of each provider.
  • Management: Requires tools and strategies to manage, monitor, and secure resources across different cloud environments. This includes consistent governance, compliance, and cost management practices across all clouds.

Hybrid Cloud Management

  • Definition: Involves a combination of on-premises infrastructure (private cloud) and public cloud services.
  • Purpose: Create a unified, flexible, and scalable computing environment that can move workloads between private and public clouds as needed.
  • Usage: Typically used to leverage the scalability and cost-efficiency of public clouds for variable workloads while keeping sensitive or critical workloads on-premises.
  • Management: Focuses on seamless integration between private and public clouds, ensuring data and application portability, consistent security policies, and efficient resource utilization.

Challenges of multi-cloud management

Managing a multicloud environment can be daunting, it requires dealing with different cloud providers each with its own set of tools and interfaces. Having to integrate and coordinate many different systems together is anything but simple. These are a few challenges organizations face:

  1. Complexity and Integration: Different cloud providers have distinct APIs, services, and interfaces, making integration complex. Ensuring a consistent management approach across diverse cloud platforms can be challenging.
  2. Security and Compliance: Implementing consistent security policies across multiple clouds is difficult due to varying security features and practices. Ensuring compliance with regulations across different jurisdictions and cloud providers requires meticulous planning and monitoring.
  3. Cost Management: Tracking and managing costs across multiple clouds can be challenging due to different pricing models and billing practices. Identifying and leveraging cost-saving opportunities across multiple providers requires advanced cost-management tools and strategies.
  4. Data Management: Ensuring data consistency and integrity across multiple cloud environments can be difficult. Moving data between different clouds can incur significant costs and latency issues.
  5. Performance and Availability: Monitoring performance across multiple cloud environments requires sophisticated tools to provide a holistic, comprehensive view. Ensuring high availability and redundancy across different cloud providers involves complex architecture and management.
  6. Skills Gaps: Managing multiple clouds requires specialized skills and knowledge of each provider’s platform, which can be scarce and costly.
  7. Vendor Lock-in and Portability: While multi-cloud strategies aim to avoid vendor lock-in, they can still face challenges in achieving true portability of applications and data. Ensuring interoperability between different cloud environments can be complex and require custom solutions.
  8. Governance and Control: Establishing a unified governance framework that works across all cloud environments can be difficult. Enforcing policies consistently across different platforms requires robust governance tools and practices.

Between high egress charges, wasteful data overrun, and silos between cloud platforms, organizations need to figure out a way to better way to embrace their multicloud landscape. Addressing these challenges requires a well-thought-out multi-cloud strategy, robust management tools, and a skilled team capable of navigating the intricacies of multiple cloud environments.

How to move workloads across a multi-cloud environment

Moving workloads across multi-cloud environments involves careful planning and the use of specialized tools and can be broken down into 3 phases:

  • Plan and Assess: Identify workloads suitable for migration based on dependencies, performance, and compliance. Utilize cloud-native or third-party migration tools (CloudEndure, AWS Migration Hub, etc.). Containerize applications (Docker, Kubernetes) or break them into microservices for easier migration. Establish consistent security and compliance across all cloud environments.
  • Execute Migration: Start with a pilot to identify and address potential issues. Use data synchronization tools and ensure sufficient network bandwidth. Set up a testing environment in the target cloud for functionality and performance validation.
  • Optimize and Manage: Optimize workloads for the new environment by adjusting configurations and resources. Implement ongoing monitoring and management practices for smooth operation and optimal performance.

How does Cribl assist with multi-cloud management?

Organizations are struggling with never-ending data growth, making it difficult for IT and security teams to gain control over routing, control over costs, and control over their multicloud environments. Moving data from all different sources into the right tools, and into the right cloud services, can mean sacrificing control and flexibility. Teams are having to reconfigure architectures and data flows to ensure parity and visibility, all while keeping a handle on ingress and egress charges.

Cribl’s suite of products can help solve these challenges with collecting, routing, shaping, enriching, and search functionalities that make data more manageable. Teams can easily clean up their data, get it where it needs to be, work more efficiently, and ultimately gain the control and confidence they need to be successful.

Here’s how Cribl’s suite of products is helping organizations tackle their multicloud use cases:

Cribl Stream

Cribl’s flagship product, is the leading observability pipeline in the cloud. Stream helps gather, process, and distribute data from various sources to the right destinations in a flexible and efficient way. Teams can create and apply intelligent routing logic to reduce data transfer within the cloud or between cloud providers. This helps reduce log volume to control costs and improve system performance.

With Cribl support of PrivateLink in AWS, teams can save significantly on bandwidth costs. Cribl helps transit data over less expensive methods, and makes it possible to look at how all systems work together. Teams can set rules for how data travels between different clouds and systems, and get a better understanding of how all data is related.

Not only that, Stream can help reduce log volume and lower egress charges. Easily eliminate duplicate fields, null values, and any elements that provide little analytical value. Filter and screen events with dynamic sampling, or aggregate log data into metrics for massive volume reduction. Reduce without worry: you can keep a full-fidelity copy in a low-cost destination and replay it back if needed.

One of the greatest concerns enterprises have about working in the cloud is security. Moving data between systems and cloud platforms leaves sensitive data vulnerable to attacks. But with Stream, you can get peace of mind with data masking, governance, and compliance — ensuring you have full control and protection over data routing.

Stream makes working in multicloud environments so much simpler, secure, and cost-efficient. Automate cloud cost management, gain visibility into cloud spend across your entire multicloud landscape and collect, process, and store only the observability data that is necessary.

Cribl Edge

This is an intelligent, scalable edge-based data collection system for logs, metrics, and application data and was designed to support today’s modern multicloud architectures. Cribl Edge is centrally managed, auto-discovers observability data at its egress point, and opens up additional, cost-effective options for data collection and processing.

With Edge’s built-in Fleet Management, you can effortlessly manage tens of thousands of Edge nodes while lowering data collection total cost of ownership. Collect all the data you need, at the edge, at scale. Cribl Edge is centrally managed, configured, and version-controlled for easy expansion and low cost of ownership.

Cribl Search

Search performs federated “search-in-place” queries on any data in any format at any location and across all your cloud services. Increase the scope of analysis without requiring the cost or complexity of first shipping, ingesting, and storing the data. This gives teams relevant, valuable data that’s only routed for further analysis if necessary.

With Cribl Stream and Edge, you’re able to cost-effectively ingest and process data, and route to low-cost storage. Further reduce storage costs by storing less frequently accessed data in low-cost object storage like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, and with Search, you still have the ability to search across them all.

Cribl Lake

Cribl Lake was designed to make setting up and managing a data lake fast and easy, with no cloud or data-specific skills required. IT and security teams can leverage low-cost object storage — whether managed by Cribl or owned by the user — to onboard huge volumes of data and make it easy to store, access, and retrieve data.

With Cribl Lake, IT and security teams can effortlessly store, manage, search, and replay data so that data becomes usable and valuable to the teams and tools that need it. Cribl Lake is fully integrated with Cribl’s suite of products — Cribl Stream and Edge allow data to be ingested from disparate sources. Data is delivered to Cribl Lake, where it’s stored in open formats, making for easy access. Data can be transformed, enriched, replayed, and routed downstream in any format, to any tool, at any time.

Cribl Search unifies the query experience no matter where data is stored and there’s no need to move or rehydrate data. Data can be queried at rest, in and across Cribl Lake, all data lakes, object stores, search APIs, and analytics solutions like OpenSearch. Federated search allows you to query not just one set of data but multiple data stores and sources, from multiple clouds, simultaneously. This means you can run fast investigations and get value from data without delays.

Want to learn more?

Discover how the right data management platform can help optimize performance, cost, and security in your multicloud environment.

Download our white paper title Multicloud: The Good, The Bad, and The Unmanageabl.

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