By Subbu Subramanian
The accelerating pace of digital transformation has compelled enterprises to adopt multicloud strategies that utilize a combination of public and private clouds. A study by BCG found that almost 95% of enterprises are already in hybrid environments, with about two-thirds of large businesses using multiple public cloud providers. This hybrid approach brings much-needed flexibility but also introduces daunting complexity into IT management.
Organizations find themselves juggling diverse cloud platforms from multiple vendors with disconnected tools and inconsistent processes. The resulting complexity strains IT resources to the brink and severely restricts organizational agility. Enterprise spending on public and private cloud computing is expected to double in the next two to three years, with the fastest growth taking place on public clouds.
However, intelligent automation has now emerged as a game-changing solution to empower enterprises to simplify cloud management, maximize efficiency, and accelerate innovation across convoluted multicloud environments. This is particularly relevant in the current scenario where businesses are increasingly relying on multicloud strategies to drive their digital transformation initiatives.
What Drives the Need for Simplified Multicloud Management?
The needs of digital businesses have made multicloud adoption a non-negotiable for most enterprises today. Several organizations now leverage a mix of on-premise data centers along with private and public cloud platforms. This enables them to select the optimal cloud environment for each application and workload based on specific requirements.
However, managing resources and workloads spread across so many disparate clouds creates unmanageable complexity. Ensuring consistent visibility, security, compliance and performance itself becomes a mammoth challenge. The global multi-cloud management market was valued at USD 8.03 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.0% from 2023 to 2030.
Intelligent automation aims to make this easier by integrating otherwise disconnected platforms under a unified management layer. Intelligent automation refers to software tools that utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics to automate complex manual tasks and optimize performance. When applied to multicloud management, these tools provide integrated visibility and control across heterogeneous on-premise and cloud environments.
They discover infrastructure and map interdependencies automatically to offer technology leaders a single pane of glass for managing multiple cloud platforms. The system leverages advanced analytics and automation to execute tedious tasks like provisioning or de-provisioning resources, ensuring adherence monitoring and policy enforcement. This approach is already being adopted by some of the leading IT companies, helping enterprises navigate the complexity of multicloud environments.
Core Capabilities in Simplifying Multicloud Environments
Taming multicloud complexity is achieved by delivering a unified interface that can manage up to 10 different cloud platforms, reducing the time spent on switching between different interfaces by 60%. This automation of routine tasks like provisioning and de-provisioning resources ensures consistent policy implementation. It also optimizes costs by providing real-time visibility into resource usage across platforms, leading to a 30% reduction in costs by identifying underutilized resources.
Dynamic allocation and deallocation of resources based on demand signals significantly improve resource utilization, leading to significant cost savings. Furthermore, it enhances speed and agility by speeding up processes requiring manual interventions. Automation of activities like application deployment reduces deployment time from hours to minutes, thereby improving the overall speed of operations.
In terms of mitigating risks, it helps in automatically tracking anomalies, reducing system downtime, and ensuring business continuity. It empowers strategic decisions by collecting and analyzing performance data across multiclouds to uncover trends and usage patterns, leading to a substantial improvement in resource planning.
Lastly, it simplifies scalability with capabilities to seamlessly scale workloads across platforms based on demand signals. This handles increased business volumes without a corresponding surge in management overheads. As a result, enterprises must identify multicloud management simplification as a top priority, evaluating such automation capabilities is no longer optional.
The technology enables improved visibility, security, governance, and compliance across complex hybrid technology environments consisting of data centers, public, and private clouds. Improved visibility and compliance can reduce security incidents, hence enhancing the overall security posture. Using advanced analytics, it provides actionable insights that help optimize investments and resources.
Key Benefits of Simplified Multicloud Management
Intelligent automation contributes to a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by reducing overall technology spending through the optimized use of cloud infrastructure and the elimination of resource wastage. It also improves compliance by providing unified visibility and automated policy enforcement, thereby enhancing risk management, security, and regulatory compliance.
The agility of operations is enhanced through smooth workload migration between platforms via automation, which in turn accelerates the speed of innovation and change. Superior resiliency is achieved through predictive analytics that minimizes service disruptions by enabling anomaly detection and self-healing capabilities. Lastly, productivity is increased as intelligent tools automate mundane tasks, allowing IT teams to focus more on innovation that creates business value.
The path to simplified, efficient and reliable multicloud management is now clearer than ever. Intelligent automation represents technologies that can help enterprises break down stubborn cloud silos and unify management. With close to half of technology leaders planning to deploy related tools over the next 2 years, it is clear that automation will underpin the next stage in multicloud evolution. Its unprecedented capabilities to tame complexity, tighten control and sharpen visibility make intelligent automation the key to optimizing convoluted multi-vendor cloud environments.
The author is regional vice president- India, Dynatrace