How Infrastructure Teams Can Achieve Their Multicloud Ambition with CDW

What's Inside

Why Canadian organizations are actively choosing multicloud
Leveraging cloud-specific capabilities, reducing cloud spend and unique business unit preferences are driving widespread multicloud adoption among Canadian organizations.
4 strategies that can help infrastructure teams achieve their multicloud ambitions
To fully realize their multicloud ambitions, CDW cloud experts suggest four strategies aimed at improving interoperability, management and performance.
Focus on the interoperability and observability of multicloud environments
Learn how interoperability and observability among multicloud environments can reduce data challenges, cut costs and improve incident preparedness.
Bring diverse cloud environments onto a unified control plane
Just 4 percent of our surveyed organizations report full implementation of a unified management control plane. Explore how it can consolidate and simplify your multicloud management.
Balance IT and business priorities with a cloud management strategy
A cloud management strategy can align business priorities with IT priorities so that your multicloud goals can be realized fruitfully, learn how to build one.
Integrate compliance and regulatory requirements
Key tactics for ensuring compliance among multicloud environments to better protect customer trust, improve efficiency and drive safe adoption.
How CDW can help you build a better, more robust multicloud
Learn how our CDW cloud experts can help you drive home positive cloud outcomes, whether in the areas of cloud strategy or multicloud deployment.

Shanghai city skyline with network communication

As Canadian organizations move toward cloud maturity, they are adopting transformative technologies that will help them get there. From deeper AI penetration to a more secure public cloud, we’re witnessing new industry-wide trends in search of better digital experiences.

The 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report, conducted by IDC on behalf of CDW Canada, aims to understand Canadian organizations' current state of cloud and AI adoption. The report revealed that 60 percent of respondents indicated they will leverage multiple public clouds over the next two years for their infrastructure needs.

While multicloud strategies offer several benefits over working with a single cloud provider, they also come with operational challenges.

Learn how your organization can unleash the power of multicloud with useful insights and real-world strategies highlighted in our 2024 Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report

Download the 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report →

Why Canadian organizations are actively choosing multicloud

As the digital footprint of an organization evolves, a single cloud provider may not always be able to service its growing technology needs. Therefore, it's not uncommon for IT teams to outgrow cloud providers as new business priorities, cost burdens and architectural patterns come into play.

As per the Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report, the key drivers of multicloud adoption are:

Leveraging unique cloud-specific capabilities from different providers
As a strategy to reduce cloud spend
Business unit and developer preferences
Data locality concerns

Despite benefits, multicloud poses several operational challenges

Although a multicloud implementation helps IT teams build more reliable infrastructure, it can introduce complexities. The Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report highlighted keeping up with constantly changing cloud offerings and pricing models as a key challenge faced by 36 percent of organizations.

35 percent of organizations cited ensuring the availability of such specialized IT skills as a multicloud concern. An equal share of organizations reported that this creates security, access and compliance bottlenecks.

4 strategies that can help infrastructure teams achieve their multicloud ambitions

IT teams may feel they are moving two steps forward with multicloud benefits and one step backwards due to the operational challenges. To fully realize their multicloud ambitions, CDW cloud experts suggest three strategies aimed at improving interoperability, management and performance.

1. Focus on the interoperability and observability of multicloud environments

As per the Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report, one-third of surveyed organizations indicated having little to no interoperability among the multiple public cloud providers they plan to use. At the same time, only five percent reported that they have a highly observable environment.

Lack of interoperability among multiple clouds can create data synchronization challenges and make it difficult to ensure compliance. Whereas, without observability, organizations may struggle to resolve issues in time and to be prepared for unforeseeable incidents.

Therefore, it’s critical to build pathways by which multiple clouds can seamlessly communicate with each other while introducing monitoring tools for multicloud systems. These measures go a long way in realizing the benefits each cloud provider brings to the table while also cutting down on cloud spend – a key goal among Canadian organizations.

For instance, let’s say an organization uses AWS for machine learning workloads alongside Google Cloud for analyzing Big Data. By ensuring interoperability and observability, the organization can:

Combine the benefits of both the cloud services seamlessly to maximize value
Keep data security and privacy under control
Quickly respond to application, platform or network issues
Stay resilient to errors or threats that may cause downtime

To achieve this, organizations can take the following architectural measures:

Include cloud-agnostic technologies

A cloud-agnostic approach involves an architecture design that is not tied to the proprietary services of any single cloud provider. This approach helps IT teams extend their architecture to multiple clouds without platform constraints.

For instance, using containers and orchestration tools like Kubernetes can help deploy applications consistently across multiple clouds. Containerized applications are platform-independent and promise greater interoperability when the solution consists of several distinct cloud services.

Automate data portability

Multicloud automation helps streamline the movement of data and applications between clouds without human intervention. Tools like AWS DataSync or Google Transfer Appliance can help automate data movement and CI/CD pipelines for consistency in deployments that span multiple clouds.

Leverage unified and cross-cloud monitoring solutions

Most cloud platforms offer their own monitoring tools, such as CloudWatch in AWS, but managing a separate dashboard for each cloud platform can get too complex.

Unified monitoring solutions simplify this by reporting key metrics such as system health, performance, resource utilization, etc., from a central platform. Similarly, cross-cloud monitoring can collect logs, incident reports and health metrics for integrated solutions to help IT teams be better aware of their multicloud infrastructure.

Implement automated incident and anomaly alerts

Automated alerts enable IT teams to improve visibility and stay vigilant to potential anomalies across their multicloud architecture. They can track, identify and respond to system issues faster, helping them build a superior customer experience. Unified observability platforms can help implement alert automations that accurately report on issues with backtrace and logs.

2. Bring diverse cloud environments onto a unified control plane

The cloud control plane (think of the settings menu in your PC) refers to the mechanism by which cloud practitioners configure, secure and orchestrate cloud services. Control planes are unique to each cloud and require individual attention and knowledge.

In a hybrid, multicloud architecture, IT teams have to work with several control planes at once, which can introduce complexity into their management functions.

Unified management control plane

A unified management control plane consolidates fragmented operations across all the cloud platforms an organization uses onto a single, easy-to-manage platform. It can greatly simplify their operations by offering a central dashboard, which controls and monitors their entire hybrid infrastructure, be it on-premises, at the edge or multicloud.

The Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report found that just 25 percent of organizations have used a unified control plane across their infrastructure to some extent, while the share of organizations with full implementation stood at just four percent.

To get the most out of their multicloud architecture, IT teams must reconcile siloed control planes for improved viability, efficiency, security, scalability, cost optimization and compliance.

By centralizing and standardizing on a unified management control plane, organizations can simplify the customer support experience significantly and allow them to work on resolving more complex problems.

3. Balance IT and business priorities with a cloud management strategy

A cloud management strategy can steer multicloud priorities in the right direction and account for risks in the process. The Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report emphasized that smaller organizations focus on curbing cloud costs whereas enterprises seek to gain better control over their cloud sprawl.

Similarly, your organization will have its own priorities. A cloud management strategy balances operational priorities like cost efficiency, security and performance, while mitigating risks such as vendor lock-in, compliance issues and downtime.

The following examples reflect how to draft a cloud management strategy.

Objective	Approach	Priority alignment
Ensure that data can be easily transferred between cloud providers	Use standardized APIs and open data formats to avoid proprietary lock-in Implement multicloud storage solutions like NetApp	Enables you to retain flexibility, avoid vendor lock-in and quickly respond in the event of an outage
Distribute workloads based on the strengths of each provider	Select best-of-breed services keeping interoperability in mind Compare service costs and SLAs before finalizing	This distribution maximizes performance and cost-efficiency by using each provider’s best tools while ensuring future alignment
Automate multicloud workflows	Use infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or Ansible	Reduces manual errors, improves speed and ensures consistency across all cloud environments
Implement security controls across environments	Use cross-platform security tools for access, network and data loss prevention	Helps security teams consolidate security operations and carefully monitor multicloud security

4. Integrate compliance and regulatory requirements

Organizations must account for compliance and regulatory requirements in their multicloud architecture to ensure they meet legal obligations, protect sensitive data and maintain customer trust.

Adhering to regulatory requirements demonstrates a commitment to data security and privacy, which can enhance customer trust and loyalty. Compliance frameworks often include best practices for data management and security, which can improve overall operational efficiency and reduce risks.

Strategies to ensure compliance

Unified compliance framework: Integrates multiple regulatory requirements into a single set of controls, facilitating streamlined compliance management. For Canadian organizations, this is particularly beneficial due to the diverse regulatory landscape, including federal laws like PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) and provincial regulations.
Automated compliance checks: Continuously monitor and ensure adherence to regulatory requirements while providing real-time monitoring for potential violations and reducing the chances of human errors.
Data protection: Data protection is a critical aspect of compliance, especially for Canadian organizations handling sensitive personal information. PIPEDA sets out the ground rules for how businesses must handle personal information in the course of commercial activities.

For example, in Canada, the Personal Health Information Protection Act requires healthcare providers to keep patient health information private from any party who is not a part of the healthcare system.

By introducing a compliance framework, healthcare organisations can identify who to share access with and implement automated checks to prevent unauthorised access across multicloud environments.

How CDW can help you build a better, more robust multicloud

Our 2024 Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report can help technology leaders and business executives stay up to date with the fast-evolving cloud landscape. It offers insights across industries alongside strategies to help you get higher returns on cloud investments.

Our CDW cloud experts can also help you drive home positive cloud outcomes, whether in the areas of cloud strategy or multicloud deployment. Our rich cloud partner network alongside our certified cloud talent pool ensures you have access to key cloud technologies and expertise.

Whether you want to upscale your IT architecture, optimize cloud costs or mitigate multicloud risks, our solution experts can help you meet your objectives.

Ready to build a better, more robust multicloud? Unlock even more insights from the report below.