Exploring Security Considerations and Best Practices for Multi-Cloud Computing

Multi-cloud refers to the use of cloud services from various cloud providers. It could be as simple as utilizing software-as-a-service (SaaS) from various cloud companies, such as Salesforce and Workday. However, in the enterprise, multi-cloud often refers to running enterprise applications on several cloud service providers' platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Multi-cloud strategies and solutions are being adopted by businesses more frequently in order to run apps where they are needed without adding complexity.

Multicloud solutions built on open-source technologies like Kubernetes enable the flexibility and portability needed to move, build, and optimize applications across various clouds and computing environments. Multi-cloud solutions are offered by many major cloud service providers as well as cloud solution providers like VMware for applications like compute infrastructure, development, data warehousing, cloud storage, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), disaster recovery/business continuity, and others.

Furthermore, multi-cloud environments complement DevOps development approaches as well as other cloud-native application technologies that enable mobility, such as containers and microservices architecture.

In this article, you will find answers to many questions that may come to mind about multi-cloud computing.

• What is multi-cloud?

• How does Multi-Cloud work in computing?

• What are the differences between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing?

• What are the advantages and benefits of utilizing a Multi-Cloud strategy?"

• What are the major challenges associated with implementing a Multi-Cloud approach?

• What are some real-world examples and use cases of Multi-Cloud?

• What are the key factors to consider when choosing between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing?

• What are some effective tools for managing a Multi-Cloud infrastructure?

• What are the best practices for managing and securing Multi-Cloud deployments?

• What are the key considerations for selecting cloud security solutions and vendors for Multi-Cloud deployments?

What is Multi-Cloud?

A cloud is a cluster of servers that cloud clients can access via the Internet. Each cloud is often administered by a cloud provider, which is a corporation that provides cloud services. A public cloud is one that is shared by multiple customers.

Multi-cloud refers to the usage of cloud computing services by a business to run its applications from at least two different cloud providers. Multiple public clouds, multiple private clouds, or any combination of the two are frequently used in multi-cloud settings. By having the option to develop a strategy that makes use of numerous vendors, you may pick and choose the capabilities that best suit your unique company needs and reduce vendor lock-in.

For example, suppose your company invests in increasing its cloud infrastructure. You've transitioned from bare-metal servers to virtualization-based workloads, and you're now looking into public cloud options, not for everything, but for a single customer-facing application with extremely unpredictable usage rates. After some investigation, you choose the public cloud provider with the ideal combination of service-level agreements (SLAs), security standards, and uptime to host your custom application. You're pleased with your decision. Customers gradually begin to request capabilities that are only available through a different vendor's exclusive app. To incorporate these capabilities into your bespoke app, you must not only acquire the vendor's app, but also host it in the vendor's proprietary public cloud - a solution that allows both apps to scale with demand.

Multi-cloud deployments have a variety of applications. A multi-cloud deployment employs various IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) vendors or a single IaaS, PaaS (platform-as-a-service), and SaaS (software-as-a-service) vendor. Multi-cloud is used solely for redundancy and system backup, or it might include many cloud vendors for various services. The majority of businesses that move to the cloud eventually build up multiple clouds. Shadow IT can even unintentionally result in a multi-cloud deployment.

How Does Multi-Cloud Work in Computing?

A multi-cloud architecture can be extremely complex. Overall, multi-cloud architectures are supported by three major pillars:

• Self-service and Automation: for determining the best environment for installing applications, data, and services, as well as dynamic resource provisioning
• Single Management and Control Plane: for cloud usage and visibility across clouds in order to establish control and manage costs
• Central Security Platform: for executing policies consistently across clouds and addressing regulatory compliance, security, and data governance requirements.

Fundamentally, a multi-cloud architecture is simply a collection of offerings or infrastructure from several providers that do not have to be tightly connected, as in a hybrid cloud.

Virtualization, containerization, and microservices are common cloud-native ideas used in modern systems.

Furthermore, these applications make use of open-source technologies like Kubernetes or OpenStack, which are already supported by the majority of cloud service providers (CSPs) and suppliers.

Cloud manufacturers are gradually offering more interoperability between their applications, tools, and services as multi-cloud deployments increase. Furthermore, enterprises can select from various multi-cloud management solutions for measuring expenses and resource usage, as well as implementing access and control policies across various clouds.

What are the Differences between Multi-cloud and Hybrid cloud computing?

Due to the significant differences in workloads, technology, and business processes between different firms, there is a lot of confusion about what multi-cloud and hybrid cloud genuinely mean. In some instances, they are even used interchangeably. But there are two different things that these two phrases refer to.

The type of cloud architecture is the key differentiator between multi-cloud and hybrid clouds. While hybrid cloud refers to the deployment of similar workloads across diverse computing environments, multi-cloud refers to the usage of cloud computing services from several public cloud vendors for a variety of workloads.

An enterprise uses various public cloud services, typically from distinct cloud providers, in a multi-cloud environment. For example, a corporation may host its online front-end application on AWS while its Exchange servers are hosted on Microsoft Azure. It employs a multi-cloud strategy to leverage cloud arbitrage based on which provider currently has the lowest price. Because not all cloud providers are created equal, and businesses strive to provide best-in-class IT services, businesses should avoid being tied to a single cloud provider or choosing providers for certain services.

The incorporation of private cloud infrastructure, such as an enterprise's own data center, alongside one or more public cloud services, usually operating in tandem to meet business goals, distinguishes hybrid cloud computing from multi-cloud computing.

As a result, the two primary distinctions are as follows:

In hybrid clouds, a private cloud is always there, and they are typically managed as a single entity.

Multi-clouds always include multiple public cloud services, which frequently have a variety of uses. Multiple clouds may be employed, but they are not required to include a private cloud component; in this case, they may also be used in multiple clouds that are hybrid clouds.

Many organizations unintentionally adopt a multi-cloud strategy, such as when various departments use various public cloud service providers for a specific function, whereas others develop a strategy for using multiple public cloud service providers as part of an all-encompassing IT strategy that includes on-premises, public-cloud based infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and SaaS offerings as a comprehensively managed hybrid IT environment.

When demand surpasses the capacity of on-premises hardware, for example, when a hybrid cloud application executes application code in both the on-premises private cloud and "cloud bursts" to the public cloud, it can employ on-premises databases.

Since the clouds will either be integrated (hybrid cloud) or not (multi-cloud), these two cloud technologies are mutually exclusive. Companies are increasingly using several cloud installations, both public and private, as they want to increase security and performance by diversifying their environments.

"What are the Advantages of Utilizing a Multi-Cloud Strategy?"

Numerous opportunities for improving your company's IT agility and flexibility can be found by utilizing multiple cloud services. The most well-known advantages of the multi-cloud are listed below:

• A more customized approach: Match your business needs with the best service providers for the business when you apply a multi-cloud architecture to your IT strategy to make it much better suited to your customer's demands. The added benefit is that instead of having to change your processes to satisfy the criteria of a supplier, you may access various solutions that best match each component of your organization and its demands.
• The very best of each cloud: Multi-Cloud enables you to select from a variety of cloud vendors and mix and match certain features and capabilities to optimize your workloads in the cloud based on variables such as speed, performance, dependability, geographical location, and security and compliance requirements.
• Innovation: When you automate the multi-cloud management process, you'll have far better workload coordination and hybrid workflows, as well as the ability to incorporate DevOps processes to propel your organization's digital infrastructure forward. This automation enables efficient data management and orchestration across cloud environments, boosting deployment choices and providing you with a larger pool of novel features to choose from.
• Vendor lock-in Prevention: A multi-cloud environment enables you to build anywhere, at any time. A multi-cloud strategy frees you from reliance on a single supplier. You can select the option that best meets your business objectives while reducing the data, interoperability, and cost challenges that frequently develop when you become overly reliant on a single cloud.
• Improved risk management: Nothing is worse than essential pieces of technology failing when you need them the most, so having a risk management strategy in place is always a good idea. By implementing a multi-cloud architecture, you offer an extra degree of security to your organization. If one of your vendors' infrastructure fails or is hacked, you may simply switch to another provider or back everything up to a private cloud to secure your applications and crucial data.
• Cost-effectiveness: Multi-Cloud deployments are an excellent way to reduce your IT spending. The public cloud has a lower overhead and allows you to scale up or down based on business needs. You can reduce TCO while simultaneously benefiting from the best pricing and performance among several suppliers.
• Infrastructure with low latency and high speed: When your company's networks are extended to several providers, it might benefit from a considerably quicker, low-latency infrastructure. This not only improves application response times, but it also creates a better user experience for your consumers. This highly efficient connection is only possible when two cloud service providers have private links.
• Cutting-edge Technology: Cloud service providers are constantly investing in the development of new goods and services. Instead of being limited to the alternatives supplied by a single cloud provider, Multi-Cloud enables you to employ new technologies as they emerge to improve your own offers.
• Advanced security and adherence to regulatory requirements: A multi-cloud strategy allows you to deploy and grow workloads while establishing consistent security and compliance policies and technologies across all of your workloads, regardless of service, vendor, or environment.
• Improved dependability and redundancy: Because it decreases the danger of a single point of failure, multi-cloud reduces unplanned downtime or outages. If your cloud experiences a problem, you can direct your computing needs to another cloud that is operational. An outage in one cloud may not always have an impact on services in other clouds.

What are the Major Challenges of Implementing a Multi-Cloud Approach?

Despite its many advantages, a multi cloud strategy has several drawbacks that some firms find difficult to overcome. Increased administrative complexity, consistent security, integrating software environments, and trouble establishing consistent performance and reliability across clouds are some of the most prevalent multi-cloud problems.

• Added Architectural Complexity: For enterprises, relying on one cloud provider gives them a better understanding of the infrastructure. Engineers understand how to grow and shape the environment to satisfy corporate needs. Introducing new technologies complicates the answer.

  The added complexity of multi-cloud administration usually necessitates more time and money to ensure the solution is properly deployed. The complexity is most likely spread over numerous technological areas, including networking, automation, data services, recoverability, and security. Furthermore, this progression may result in increased expenses due to the need to maintain personnel with unique knowledge of each cloud provider.

  Although individual products, such as Microsoft SQL Server, will continue to function as before, a SQL Server database administrator who is familiar with and understands the Microsoft Azure ecosystem might not be as familiar with, say, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. Each cloud provider has its own set of problems that must be solved. A specific understanding of each is only one aspect.

  Some of this complexity might be reduced by employing DevOps approaches and management tools like Kubernetes, which abstract some of the intricate distinctions between cloud platforms. DevOps can enable a workflow that is independent of any public cloud provider. Regardless of the underlying cloud provider, Kubernetes offers a more seamless experience. The deployed pods would continue to provide API or application services in the same manner, whether in Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

• Planning for Disaster Recovery: Disaster recovery is a frequently disregarded subject. Disasters occur even among cloud providers, so businesses must plan for recovery when (not if) they occur. Understanding each cloud provider's failure modes and how they may affect your application stack is critical for developing dependable applications. Because of the increasing complexity of various cloud providers in the mix, this issue should be prioritized from the outset.

  Recovering from a disaster across numerous cloud providers can be challenging. Each cloud provider frequently has a customized way of implementing a recovery process. This added complexity may impede your set recovery point goal (RPO) and recovery time target (RTO). Compromises in RPO and RTO metrics may result in service-level agreement violations in the future.

  Failure scenarios pose concerns about how you handle multi-cloud failover, for example, where you "home" DNS records and how you handle the transfer. Large online organizations accomplish this by hosting solutions outside of the networks that serve their apps. If you require extremely high levels of availability, this additional layer of redundancy may be necessary. This applies to physical redundancy, such as in data centers. Each cloud provider manages its own physical requirements, such as electricity, water, cooling, and so on, adding another degree of redundancy. Even if a multi-cloud environment requires disaster recovery, you should take advantage of the built-in redundancy that such a topology offers.

• Costs and cloud sprawl: Sprawl can occur in every area of an organization, from resources to tools. Sprawl manifests itself as an abundance of things, in this case, cloud resources that have grown cumbersome and potentially unmanageable in the absence of action.

  In prior years, a prevalent issue was server sprawl, which occurred when servers were developed, implemented, and then ignored. The cycle would continue, and before long, an organization would control a vast server farm that it had no idea existed. Cloud ecosystems can sometimes become cumbersome and unwieldy. Organizations are more vulnerable to sprawl as a result of the ease with which cloud resources, such as virtual machines, may be swiftly created. This self-service paradigm of deploying cloud services in minutes leaves enterprises with a shorter retention time to do something with it. This type of overuse may be seen in a popular horror story about a cloud resource being established and then forgotten, resulting in a large payment for the organization and potentially reducing the bottom line of any organization. Cost management is critical.

• Security policy administration: Managing security policies is another important aspect of this architectural design. Given the increasing prevalence of cyberattacks, a multi-cloud ecosystem can broaden the attack vector for a bad actor to potentially compromise.

  Organizations must exercise greater caution in order to safeguard all of their boundaries, which are now spread across multiple cloud platforms. This can be difficult in a multi-cloud scenario due to the many types of endpoints that exist in each cloud.

• Choosing the Best Multi-Cloud Management Software: When you grow any ecosystem to a more sophisticated and potentially tightly coupled environment, it can be challenging to maintain consistent and reliable multi-cloud management. While each cloud provider provides its own monitoring tools, these tools sometimes lack any holistic overview beyond their own limits, and manually monitoring or using different technologies to piece together performance insights can frequently result in more hassles than resolutions. Instead of simply watching check that you can see what's going on in your multi-cloud setup. Observability insights can help deliver more comprehensive visibility and actionable intelligence in complicated contexts, bringing focus and clarity. This expanded visibility across your IT infrastructure and services can make management easier, minimize resource sprawl, improve cost management, and improve overall availability.

What are real-world examples and use cases of Multi-Cloud?

Enterprises are leveraging multiple cloud platforms and services to advance the next phase of digital transformation. Here are six examples of Multi-Cloud:

• Applications with Multiple Components: A multi-cloud is a great fit for any system with numerous components and a wide range of requirements. For example, an app may demand web and application server scalability on short notice. Meanwhile, raw processing power is required by the backend. A single cloud provider might bind a company to a specific template, preventing CTOs from ensuring the best possible arrangement for both components. However, in a multi-cloud architecture, a corporation can spread workloads to guarantee that each component has the appropriate sort of cloud service.

• Container Management: Containerization enables teams to house all of the files required for a program to run inside a single unit (container). When moving software between apps, deployments, and systems, containerized programs increase agility and eliminate errors. Docker and Kubernetes are the two most visible actors in the container arena today. Containerization and multi-cloud are inextricably linked. Here are four examples of how the two technologies interact:

  • Container migration: Consistent networking enables developers to migrate workloads from on-premises to public clouds and vice versa.
  • Peak-time expansion: A business can disperse a load across numerous containers and clouds. This adaptability is essential when single-day transactions exceed the norm.
  • Relocation of services: If the main cloud fails, the team can quickly move services or microservices to alternative clouds, preventing downtime.
  • Automatic failovers: In the event of an outage, a multi-cloud arrangement can automatically failover to another cloud.

• On-Ramping and Off-Ramping Data: Data can be moved rapidly and efficiently from the data center to the cloud in multi-cloud settings. Cloud storage can be used for the following purposes:

  • Compression and change block tracking help accelerate migrations.
  • To allow for easier data transfer methods.
  • To provide cross-cloud compatibility. Data on and off-ramping using a multi-cloud is a simple, cost-effective, pay-as-you-go approach.

• Pipeline Improvements for CI/CD: With the multi-cloud, an application's data moves between environments based on the demands of developers and end users. Multiple clouds are useful for DevOps teams and rapid CI/CD procedures because of this feature.

  DevOps engineers are better equipped to manage data sets and clones for creation, testing, and deployment while using several clouds. Expanding across all databases, file servers, and file sharing, portable and accessible cloud structures provide increased automation and scalability.

  The "blue/green" deployment strategy makes excellent use of multi-cloud. This application release entails gradually transferring traffic from an older version of a program to an identical new release. Both environments are operational, and a multi-cloud architecture enables developers to easily divert traffic to one infrastructure set and then shift it back in the event of a problem.

• A Shadow IT Solution: Shadow IT arises when departments within a firm choose to employ different cloud providers to satisfy the demands of their respective teams. The additional complexity and security considerations that come with having several non-aligned providers raise risks and reduce efficiency.

  A multi-cloud arrangement enables a corporation to ensure that each department has a cloud solution that meets the needs of the team. Meanwhile, the organization has visibility into daily operations and guarantees that no security breaches exist.

• Backup and Recovery on the Cloud: Multiple clouds make the backup and archiving simpler, less expensive, and more trustworthy. This architecture improves the performance and scalability of object storage and enables businesses to use the configuration for essential data preservation. Using various cloud providers enables a company to have a backup infrastructure ready for disaster recovery. Duplicate infrastructure sets in different data centers are an ideal solution for dealing with outage circumstances.

What are the key factors to consider when choosing between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing?

You must consider many factors when choosing between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud systems; for example, requirements such as management complexity, data security issues, integration issues, increased risk of data breaches, and overall cost impact.

Let's weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. The following table shows the differences between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing.

Standards	Multi-Cloud Solutions	Hybrid Cloud Solutions
Data safety	Medium	Excellent
Monitor	Limited	Excellent
The ability to scale	Medium	Excellent
Administration	Complex	Complex
Collaboration	Challenging	Challenging
Geographical scope	Excellent	Limited
Cost reduction	Excellent	Excellent
Data security	Medium	Excellent

Table 1. Comparison of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud

Which option is better for your company, then? Your individual goals and requirements, the sort of data you're working with, and the degree of protection and control you demand all play a role. While hybrid clouds offer stronger data privacy and security, more control over sensitive data, better scalability, and cost optimization, multi-cloud systems offer greater cloud efficiency and better geographic coverage.

As of right now, hybrid clouds are becoming more popular. Businesses shift partially to the cloud because it is too expensive or resource-intensive for them to do so fully. Instead, they favor keeping some operations, business logic, and data storage on-site or in a private cloud.

While it is a good idea to retain commonly accessed data on public servers, sensitive data should stay on-premises or in the private cloud. Particularly given the results of a recent ISC poll, which indicate that 78% of respondents say conventional security solutions either don't operate at all or have limited functionality in cloud environments.

The multi-cloud approach, which has gained popularity recently, enables businesses to pick the finest services from a variety of public cloud providers. In addition to increasing business continuity, scaling IT and software resources, assisting in avoiding dependence on a single provider, lowering the costs of software operations and storage capacity, and flexibility as each of the organization's demands may be satisfied with the best available solution on the market, this ensures improvements in many other areas as well. By 2025, it is already anticipated that 90% of organizations will use it.

What are some effective tools for managing a Multi-Cloud infrastructure?

In addition to maximizing the benefits of multi-cloud settings, multi-cloud management tools may successfully get over the many difficulties that come with multi-cloud. The best multi-cloud administration tools are listed below:

• Microsoft Azure: Secure administration of on-premises, public cloud, multi-cloud, and edge settings are offered by Microsoft Azure.Your ability to manage and control your cloud resources depends on a single administration panel.The flexibility to design and deploy apps anywhere is one advantage of multi-cloud.

  Additionally, Azure is an enterprise-grade platform that is better suited for businesses wishing to update their IT infrastructure and adopt a hybrid approach. As a result, Azure does not handle many of the challenges that come with the multi-cloud world of today.

• Multi-cloud cost intelligence platform, CloudZero AnyCost: CloudZero AnyCost gathers, normalizes, and displays cost intelligence from software platforms including Snowflake, New Relic, MongoDB, and Databricks, as well as cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes.

  Cost allocation tags are not necessary. In order to give you a holistic picture of the cost to develop and maintain your products, CloudZero will correlate expenses across tagged, untagged, untaggable, and multi-tenant resources. The ability to analyze your multi-cloud costs down to a specific client, product, software feature, team, environment, and more makes CloudZero very unique.

  Your finance, engineering, and FinOps teams can pinpoint precisely where to decrease expenses or spend more to maximize returns if they use the same cost language. For instance, you can choose how to price your services at renewal in order to safeguard your margins by considering the costs of supporting a specific customer. Alternatively, you could identify cost centers you don't need. Drift used CloudZero to accomplish this and saved $2.4 million annually on AWS costs. You too can.

• Multi-cloud security platform LaceWork: One outstanding platform, LaceWork, handles threats and safeguards your accounts across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud (GCP).

  It may be used to protect your Kubernetes and hybrid cloud settings (which combine private, on-premises, and public clouds). Lacework lets you act on them without opting for agent-based deployment or continually collects and monitors application, user, process, and network activity, vulnerabilities, and configurations, giving you agentless action

• Multi-cloud deployment platform Terraform: Utilizing the same workflow to manage cross-cloud dependencies and coordinate numerous providers is made easier with Terraform. Any infrastructure can be managed, provisioned, secured, and audited using a single procedure.

  Not only does this make managing orchestration and compliance for your multi-cloud infrastructures at scale simpler. Additionally, it lowers risks, lowers management expenses and effort, and raises productivity. Terraform gives you the ability to employ best-of-breed features by combining features from more than 200 different sources using logical topology.

• Open-source multi-cloud platform RedHat Ansible: Ansible can be used to create a custom multi-cloud administration tool. Whether you employ simply servers or servers, virtual private networks, particular OS configurations, load balancers, and subnets in your application environment, you can use Ansible to ensure that your cross-cloud infrastructure components function together in tandem to suit your use case needs. Ansible strives to make multi-cloud and hybrid cloud installations more predictable. As an alternative to educating entire teams on how to interact with each cloud vendor in your setup, you may automate your environments with policies.

• Environment-as-a-Service platform called Cloudify: An open-source tool for managing and automating multi-cloud applications is called Cloudify. High-level codes are available in every context and can be utilized as templates to run programs. Role-based access control, Python support, and deployment management are some of its additional features. However, because it is open source, Cloudify has fewer features and a less user-friendly interface. Overall, it is better suited for deployment services than for cost-cutting strategies.

• Morpheus: A no-code utility for managing several clouds: Utilizing cloud-native services on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP is made easier with the aid of Morpheus. Additionally, Morpheus streamlines the deployment of entire application stacks (PaaS) using almost any public cloud, as well as virtual machines, bare metal, and containers (IaaS/CaaS). Kubernetes, VMware, HPE OneView, OpenStack, and Cisco UCS are all included in that. Without the requirement for your IT employees to familiarize themselves with each public cloud in your toolkit. Using a uniform API and console, the platform lets you offer cloud-native PaaS, IaaS, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) blueprints. Then, you can use a single public cloud account that is accessible to everyone. After that, Morpheus handles reporting and governance.

• Multi-cloud management platform from IBM: Both multi-cloud and hybrid cloud installations are supported by IBM's MCMP. Organizations can manage environments across many Kubernetes clouds and customers using IBM Cloud Manager. For improved control, the platform unifies all the environments into a single, consolidated perspective. It offers disaster recovery, application backups, configuration tools, and the possibility to automate workflows for all workloads. The ability of Multi-Cloud Manager to use configuration tools to improve security and control is its greatest strength. Additionally, IBM Multi-Cloud Manager is primarily used for enterprise-level businesses using containerized applications.

• Full-stack observability platform Dynatrace: You may extract, correlate, and monitor data from various public, private, or hybrid clouds with the Dynatrace system. The majority of public clouds, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, are included. Other well-known platforms covered include RedHat (OpenStack and OpenShift), VMware Tanzu, SAP Business Technology Platform, and the IBM Cloud Foundry. The service automatically locates, gathers, and analyzes metadata to show how your system's components interact with one another and how different apps and services depend on one another.

• Hybrid multi-cloud platform powered by Nutanix Cloud Manager: A multi-cloud management tool called NCM Cost Governance (formerly Beam) offers in-depth analyses of cloud consumption trends, cost reduction, and security compliance. Additionally, it can offer suggestions for lowering cloud expenses. Reports on cloud consumption, resource rightsizing advice, suggestions for reducing cloud costs, and the ability to establish tags are all provided by Nutanix.

• Platform for managing several clouds and hypervisors: CloudBolt: As an abstraction layer for multi-cloud administration, CloudBolt functions. It allows you to combine several solutions within a single catalog. In order to accomplish this, CloudBolt has a pluggable architecture that enables you to support additional technologies as needed. More than 20 resource handlers can be integrated, making provisioning and orchestration easier. These include Hyper-V, vCenter, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and SCVMM.

What are the Best Practices for Managing and Securing Multi-Cloud Deployments?

Whatever the mix of cloud services, businesses need to make sure that pandemonium doesn't set in. Here are seven effective practices for handling multi-cloud systems' increasing complexity. Best practices for managing several clouds are explained below:

1. Implement uniform policies in all contexts: You must apply identical policies across all environments to provide proper multi-cloud management. For instance, if you want to increase availability, you should install two identical systems in different clouds with the same performance and security configurations. Your team should apply a holistic approach to policy management and carry out the following tasks:
   • Maintain uniform storage, compute, and cloud networking protocols and formats.
   • Use a standardized set of access and control regulations.
   • Create global rules for monitoring user activity, sending alerts, spotting dangers, and addressing cloud security problems.

Make rule management easier for staff employees by centralizing policy administration. Additionally, your group must develop a comprehensive security strategy that outlines the following characteristics of the multi-cloud:

• Data types that are acceptable.
• Rules for authentication.
• Regulation is a must.
• Ways to verify compliance statuses.
• Procedures for workload and cloud migration.
• Discover more about cloud security guidelines and why any corporation using the cloud needs a corporate policy for utilizing cloud-based resources.

2. Create an effective team and governance program: Companies that make a significant shift to the cloud will see a sea change in their business and IT operations, necessitating the formation of an elite team to handle all facets of cloud administration.

An executive leader who manages all cloud-related operations and is responsible for the success of the cloud strategy should be one of the team's core players. A cloud security manager, a compliance/privacy expert, cloud architects, cloud engineers, system administrators, and executive sponsors who provide funds and support are other members.

To make sure that all cloud service providers are aware of the needs of the business and any changes in requirements for apps, storage, security, and other IT-related issues, team members must maintain close communication with all cloud service providers. In order to ensure that needs are met, at least one person should be responsible for continual collaboration with cloud providers.

The possibility of problems like cost overruns, security breaches, privacy and compliance issues, as well as other hazards, calls for strong governance. Companies need to develop metrics that will guarantee that cloud-related costs are not spiraling out of control and that the proper access and other security measures are in place, in addition to sticking to the service agreements negotiated with service providers. 3. Create portable workloads using containers: Make sure cloud workloads can switch between platforms without requiring significant code modifications. Although virtual machines can produce comparable results, using containers to create portable multi-cloud assets is the most efficient approach.

Containers, lightweight packages of code, and all of their dependencies make up a containerized workload. The foundation of cloud-native architecture is made up of these executable components, which include everything needed for the code to function in any setting.

The team can transfer an app from one cloud to another when using containers in a multi-cloud environment without affecting performance or availability metrics. For instance, you can migrate a workload to another platform without experiencing any service interruptions if one provider experiences a cloud outage. Additionally, your software's reliance on any one vendor decreases, increasing company agility. 4. Understand the When and Why of Moving Workloads: Refrain from switching workloads across clouds on a whim. The team must always be aware of when (and why) an asset is being moved to a new platform. Moving workloads still requires some work, even if you use containers, and there is always a chance that you'll introduce errors.

Always examine cloud workloads to determine their appropriateness for a given environment. A single public cloud rather than a multi-cloud is probably a better fit for your use case in the absence of that information.

Workload mapping to the right cloud services based on company needs is an excellent approach. By doing so, you may explain the rationale behind the workload's location and reduce the possibility of someone relocating an asset without a valid justification.

The likelihood of overlaps in the functions the clouds carry out is reduced by matching workloads to business requirements. Paying for two different services that perform the same function is pointless. 5. Purchase the appropriate cloud management tools: It's not unexpected that a market for cloud management solutions has developed given the rapid expansion of cloud services and the propensity for enterprises to employ a variety of clouds. In order to better control how they use and maintain services, organizations can benefit from some of the most recent technology, like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

To meet the complete spectrum of needs, many enterprises are turning to SaaS-enabled services and a combination of SaaS and on-premises management tools. According to IDC, companies can build a management environment that most closely meets their business objectives, compliance requirements, and preferred budget through strategies that balance on-premises and SaaS-based multi-cloud management products and services. 6. Establish external monitoring: Your team won't be able to dependably if you don't have total insight into a multi-cloud environment.

• Follow suspicious activities and user behavior and take appropriate action.
• Examine and rank the fixes.
• Keep an eye on your spending and consumption habits.
• Determine any service disruptions. Despite the fact that the majority of manufacturers have a native cloud monitoring tool, each cloud provider only provides a broad overview of the infrastructure that is hosted on their cloud. To manage a complete multi-cloud, look for a platform that integrates various cloud vendors and services. The best monitoring equipment should perform the next tasks:
• Give you the ability to monitor activity across all platforms.
• Consolidate notifications, alerts, events, and logs from many sources.
• Utilize APIs, agentless techniques, and agent-based techniques to automatically acquire data from various clouds.
• One dashboard for all situations is needed.
• Keep track of performance metrics (such service availability and network latency).

7. Maintain Cost Awareness: Since different service providers use different techniques for charging, multi-clouds make invoicing more difficult. You need a system that enables you to keep track of costs for each expense across all vendors. Create a cross-cloud system that assists with:
   • Calculate the setup expenses for each cloud platform.
   • Keep track of how frequently each service is used.
   • Analyze the traffic and integration costs.
   • Determine wasteful consumption (such as "zombie" resources, inadequate instance sizing, orphan snapshots, etc.).
   • Identify areas for cost reduction and project future expenses. Additionally, the application could offer spending trends to aid with corporate planning. Use a mapping technique to keep track of deployments and numerous cost-related data points, just like with workloads. You can determine whether a service is cost-effective using the information provided. The firm must keep track of the amount of time employees spend administering multiple cloud systems. You can determine how profitable each service is for your company by measuring the labor budget.
8. Develop the necessary skills: These days, cloud-related positions in IT are some of the most sought-after ones. These consist of cloud engineers, architects, security experts, and other professionals. Organizations need to develop the skills necessary to manage and maintain increasingly complex cloud infrastructures, in addition to having the best tools available. The demand for those with substantial experience dealing with the cloud is anticipated to be high. The majority of businesses are having trouble juggling their conflicting objectives of improving multi-cloud management processes and skills (mentioned by 55% of respondents) and ensuring the availability of qualified IT workers (52%).
9. Strengthen Multi-Cloud Security: Security is listed as a significant challenge in multi-cloud management by more than 60% of adopters. Traditional network security "castle and moat" tactics (or even some single-cloud implementations) cannot be used by businesses to secure a multi-cloud.

To increase security, stay away from combining the built-in tools of the supplier with outside products. Instead, search for a centralized platform that offers multi-cloud security management through a single interface. A few best practices for protecting a multi-cloud are listed below:

• Instead of the other way around, design your security methods around pertinent compliance regulations (such as HIPAA and PCI).
• Audit log data (new users, access privileges, login times, user activity, etc.) on a regular basis.
• Update all programs, platforms, and systems with the most recent fixes.
• Rely on end-to-end encryption to safeguard data and inter-cloud interactions (scheduling, monitoring, routing, etc.) while they are at rest, in transit, and while being used.
• Incorporate DevSecOps practices into your CI/CD workflow, if possible.
• Create response strategies for diverse cyberattacks.
• To give teams secure and practical baselines for access, governance, and logging standards, use landing zones.
• Use a different tendency to run each app and environment (development, testing, staging, production, etc.).
• Assure that each employee only has access to the information and resources required for them to carry out their duties (the so-called zero-trust security approach).
• Regularly backup systems and data to the cloud.
• Spend money on effective catastrophe recovery procedures.
• Plan frequent security awareness training to make sure the staff is aware of what is expected of them and the dangers they can encounter when managing several clouds.
• Find a detailed explanation of each of these steps in our post on multi-cloud security, along with a few more.

10. Maximize the Use of Automation: Automation via cloud APIs is crucial for efficient multi-cloud management. Automating routine manual tasks benefits:

• Reducing the possibility of human error.
• Easing routine administrative tasks.
• Various procedures (and, to some extent, your time to market) being expedited. The following tasks are more swift and reliable thanks to automation:
• Installing apps.
• Cloud service provisioning and deprovisioning.
• Scaling up activities to accommodate current usage or traffic demands.
• Moving workloads between several clouds.
• Implementing uniform rules across several clouds.
• Addressing dangers and issues (such as higher expenses, excessive or insufficient resource use, configuration faults, etc.)

What are the key considerations for selecting cloud security solutions and vendors for Multi-Cloud deployments?

The requirements you have specific to your business and the evaluation standards you use will determine your cloud provider choice. It is an evaluation of a service provider, usually based on a few key criteria.

You can safeguard your infrastructure and workloads by taking the following factors into account when planning your multi-cloud architecture.

• Authentication and authorization: Look for a framework that can support the various authentication mechanisms used by different cloud providers while allowing you to centrally define accounts, roles, and policies. It's crucial that authorization and authentication are independent of any specific cloud service or provider.
• Upgrades and patching: Even for the same sort of infrastructure or workload, each cloud provider may have distinct vulnerabilities and solutions. Automate software fixes and upgrades to make sure they take into account the workload, the infrastructure it is currently using, and its dependencies.
• Hardware hardening: It is necessary to harden applications and infrastructure parts in accordance with the applicable security best practices. This entails safeguarding APIs and web interfaces, eliminating unused software, shutting down open ports, and adhering to the least privilege principle when it comes to user and service access.
• Observation and visibility: You can rely on the basic security tools provided by the cloud provider. To use a multi-cloud, you must have a multi-cloud support tool that will enable viewing of the entire environment. With a comprehensive view of systems spanning several clouds, you can identify, investigate, and address cyber threats.
• Cloud storage options: Sort data to be stored in the cloud and make sure important information is placed in the most secure storage areas possible. Tailor the regional distribution of your data to your compliance needs. Use data loss prevention (DLP) tools to detect data theft or loss across various clouds.