As businesses increasingly adopt multicloud architectures to drive innovation and create value, IT leaders face mounting pressure to develop a successful multicloud strategy. While our comprehensive ‘IT Leader’s Guide to Multicloud Readiness‘ provides a detailed exploration of the multicloud migration, this blog post serves as a primer, providing valuable insights into the benefits of a multicloud approach and a step-by-step blueprint to migrating to a multicloud environment. If you have not explored the guide, I highly recommend you do so. It’s free and full of fantastic insights.

By leveraging the information in both resources, IT leaders can make informed decisions to optimize costs, streamline workload deployment and management, ensure critical app and service reliability, and align IT teams and stakeholders for successful multicloud adoption.

Step 1: Define Needs and Objectives for your Multicloud Migration

Whether you’re looking to move from on-prem to the cloud or migrate from one cloud provider to another, it’s important to understand your needs and objectives. Simply wanting to reduce operational costs may not be the only reason, as it depends on how modernized your application is. To define your objectives, you need to identify pain points with your current provider and decide what you want to achieve with a multicloud strategy. This could involve a best-of-breed model where you use different providers for different functions. For example, you might find that identity management works better in Azure, while Power BI is a better analytical tool than what AWS offers.

Additionally, deciding what to move to the cloud, including data, workloads, and identity management, will give you a clearer picture of your migration path. Understanding yourself is the key to defining the needs and objectives that will guide your multicloud strategy.

STEP 2: Understand Different Offerings From the Clouds

To make an informed decision, it’s crucial to understand the different offerings of the clouds. This step involves evaluating various cloud providers, such as Azure and GCP, based on functionality, performance, and cost. By comparing these features, you can develop a cost optimization strategy to refine your approach. One pain point for many users is deciding whether to move from AWS to Azure or GCP. Therefore, understanding the providers in the market is critical. Evaluating these features and different cloud providers will help you refine your strategy, including what data and workloads will move where.

STEP 3: Evaluate Security and Compliance

When considering multicloud adoption, the third step should be to evaluate security and compliance. This is crucial because the primary challenge of distributing yourself into multiple clouds is ensuring security and compliance. Your data, workloads, and users will be spread across different locations, which poses security risks. Therefore, it is important to assess if your compliance guidelines and risk assessment allow for multicloud adoption. To comply with regulations, you will need to send your logs to a central repository, but it is essential to evaluate if this will work in a multicloud environment. It is necessary to define these factors before making any implementation decisions.

 

STEP 4: Cloud Management in your Multicloud Migration

To successfully manage multiple clouds, you need to develop a cloud management strategy to manage all the different environments and resources. This is going to be a challenge as managing multiple clouds can be more complex than managing a single cloud. You need to decide what cloud management tools you are going to use to manage your assets, resources and dashboard. In a single cloud provider like AWS, you will use Cloudwatch, but in a multi-cloud environment, you need to decide whose tools you are going to use, whether it is a third-party tool or the cloud provider’s own tool. You also need to understand the cost of each cloud provider and have a cost optimization strategy in place. There are open source tools such as Grafana, Elastic Search, and Prometheus, but implementing these can be costly. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the market for third-party tools, Azure Management Tools, and Terraform Enterprise to determine the best solution for your needs. As a partner, we can evaluate these tools and provide solutions that are tailored to your needs. We have a solution for each step of the cloud migration process and can advise you based on your needs. Overall, the successful implementation of a cloud management strategy will help you manage your cloud resources efficiently and cost-effectively.

STEP 5: Develop a User Management Strategy

When migrating to the cloud, managing users can become a complex task. In order to avoid managing users separately on different platforms, it is essential to develop a user management strategy. The cloud provides certain tools that connect your corporate Active Directory with the cloud, allowing for a centralized source of truth for user management. This means that all of the clouds pull data from your active directory, making it unnecessary to manage users separately on each cloud platform. Additionally, third-party tools such as Okta or Azure Identity Management can be used for user management.

By establishing a centralized user management repository, all clouds can pull user and group information from one place. This provides several benefits, including easier and less time-consuming onboarding of new employees. Rather than adding new users to each cloud platform individually, new users can be added to the central repository, and all clouds will pull data from that source. This significantly simplifies the process of managing users and eliminates the need to manage proficient users on-premises and separately on the cloud. With an effective user management strategy in place, you can ensure a seamless migration to the cloud with minimal disruption to your organization’s operations.

STEP 6: Implementation and Migration to Multicloud

Implementing and migrating to a multicloud environment is a crucial step in the cloud adoption process. In this step, the focus is on moving the data and workloads to the destination cloud. The migration process should be based on the principles of continuous integration and continuous development to ensure a smooth transition.

The first step in implementing and migrating to multicloud is to create a detailed migration plan. This plan should include a timeline, resource allocation, and contingency plans. The migration plan should also outline the data and applications that will be migrated and the order in which they will be moved.

Once the migration plan is in place, the actual migration process can begin. During this phase, data and applications are moved to the destination cloud in a controlled manner. It is important to ensure that there is no loss or corruption of data during the migration process.

To ensure that the migration process is successful, it is important to conduct regular testing and validation of the migrated data and applications. This will help to identify and resolve any issues that may arise during the migration process.

STEP 7: Refine Strategy and Optimize Solution for your Multicloud Migration

Refining the strategy and optimizing the solution is an ongoing process that should be part of any project. Once the cloud migration is complete, it is important to continuously review the strategy and the solutions to ensure they are meeting the evolving needs of the organization. This can be achieved through continuous integration and development, which allows for the continuous testing and deployment of new solutions and the ongoing optimization of existing solutions based on user feedback and performance metrics. By continuously refining the strategy and optimizing the solution, organizations can ensure that they are making the most of their cloud investment and delivering the best possible outcomes for their business.

Next Steps for Multicloud Migration

A successful multicloud strategy requires careful planning and execution across all seven steps. By following these steps, businesses can develop a strategic approach to multicloud adoption that aligns with their specific business objectives, optimizes costs, and streamlines workload deployment and management. It’s essential for IT leaders to recognize the benefits of multicloud adoption and understand the challenges that come with it, including proper guidance and resources.

For a more in-depth look at multicloud strategy, we highly recommend reading the ‘IT Leader’s Guide to Multicloud Readiness.’ This practical guide provides key insights and important factors to consider in developing a successful multicloud strategy, including identifying the right cloud providers and services for your needs, optimizing costs, maintaining critical app and service reliability, and aligning IT teams and stakeholders for successful multicloud adoption. Download this guide and explore how to make informed decisions in your multicloud strategy to enable innovation and business value.