Avoiding the Complexity and Overprovisioning of Multiple Clouds

The growing numbers of European businesses leveraging hybrid multicloud environments are often watching costs spiral beyond expectations and sooner rather than later must face the reality that they are spawning new types of data silos.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations were focused foremost on enabling remote workers and quickly spinning up services in the cloud to ensure continuing operations. Now, planning for a post-pandemic world, they are struggling to come to grips with the inefficiencies that can accompany use of multiple public clouds.

Public cloud providers tend to have specific strengths for particular workloads, so many organisations end up utilising a mix that includes a relationship with two or more of the Big Three—Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure—among others.

When you add to that mix the private clouds and on-premises systems that also are typically in use, data can be anywhere and everywhere. That can create a nightmare when it comes to keeping track of what data resides where, an increasingly important consideration under EU data governance requirements.

In search of a seamless, efficient cloud environment

This also tends to result in overprovisioning and wasted, inefficient infrastructure that slows cloud adoption and innovation. You might have five or six or seven top technology point solutions in your cloud environment, with little hope that they’ll all work together seamlessly and efficiently.

There is a way out of this conundrum, however. Instead of perpetuating silos, you could rely on a data fabric that spans your different clouds and on-premises systems, delivering consistent and integrated data management services. Instead of wondering what data is being used where, you can have visibility and insights across the entire environment, with improved access and control, better data protection and security, and a full understanding of where you are overspending.

NetApp’s Cloud Manager is a centralised system for viewing and managing your on-premises and cloud storage, supporting multiple cloud providers and accounts. The system empowers IT professionals to provide their internal and external users with optimised cloud services.

Spot-on optimisation

Cloud Manager gives IT experts and cloud architects a centralised control plane to manage, monitor, and automate data in hybrid-cloud environments. Furthermore, with Spot by NetApp, you can automate the optimisation of those resources to make application-driven infrastructures a reality and shave costs substantially.

Spot technology uses machine learning and analytics to automate and optimise cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Spot provides hands-free cloud infrastructure management that automatically uses the most efficient mix of instances and pricing models, eliminating overprovisioning and waste.

Over 60% of all cloud costs are attributable to compute, and many organisations subscribe to compute capacity that often sits idle or underutilised. Spot manages spot instance provisioning and available reserved instances to optimise an organisation’s use of cloud resources across the Big Three services to deliver availability and performance at the lowest possible cost.

As you develop your post-pandemic hybrid multicloud strategy, it will pay off to focus how you can move toward an integrated infrastructure where data and services move freely between platforms, clouds, and environments.

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