In recent years, hybrid or multi-cloud environments have become the cloud model of choice for most organisations. While this has its benefits, with application workloads placed in the most suitable cloud environments, silos create issues that many are currently facing.
If data is fragmented and stored in different locations, visibility is compromised and organisations risk missing out on important insights. Cloud platforms from different vendors may not be well-integrated with each other, or those integrations may be difficult to maintain, making managing cloud environments as a whole a challenge. In fact, in Computing's research, 39 per cent of survey respondents cited a lack of integration between cloud environments.
Silos can also be a people problem. With organisations deploying different products from different vendors, teams risk becoming siloed, both in terms of the applications and workloads they are dealing with and the teams themselves, with employees developing vendor-specific skills with little overarching cloud management strategy and communication between teams.
When asked whether cloud teams are siloed, opinion was evenly split among respondents, with 36 per cent neither agreeing or disagreeing with the statement. Encouragingly, this suggests that some organisations have already worked to remove silos, but for those that still deem silos to be an issue, addressing their organisation's culture is key. Teams may have developed vendor-specific skills with little overarching cloud management strategy, so encouraging collaboration is important to tackling the problem of silos.
But what can organisations do to address the issue of silos?
A clearly laid out multi-cloud strategy is vital to ensuring an organisation's cloud environment is delivering in terms of security, performance, and cost, while also removing silos. This involves having a single unified interface that makes different cloud tools easier to manage, while also helping organisations harvest greater insights from their data. When asked what an ideal cloud operating model would look like for their organisation, one respondent said it would be "Holistic and non-siloed, non-complex and transparent to all", and this can be achieved through unified cloud management.
Technology partners should therefore be providing customers with a unified data platform that will provide end-to-end visibility across their multi-cloud environments.
Another route organisations may wish to take is to have a team responsible for cloud management as a whole. 57 per cent said that their organisation has a singular team responsible for overall cloud management, but for the 42 per cent, this may be something worth considering.
Further reducing silos also involves addressing the cloud culture at an organisation. At all levels of the organisation, employees should be well aware of, and trained in, the cloud tools available to them, and be able to access them easily in their working lives. If data or applications are locked away in another part of a business and not easily usable, end users will be less productive, less effective, and the business will ultimately be less profitable.
To find out more about achieving multi cloud success, read the full Computing report
This post is sponsored by VMware
