If you are planning to deploy multi-cloud, or even if you already have a multi-cloud setup running, hold on. About 30% and 70% who implement multi-cloud fail to achieve their desired outcomes.

When you think of multi-cloud, you expect the best of all worlds. You may think of best-of-breed services, cost-efficiency, risk migration, and increased bargaining power. For instance, AWS gives advanced analytics, Microsoft Azure has easy MS Office integrations, and Google Cloud delivers strong Artificial Intelligence capabilities. 

But for all the benefits, the multi-cloud approach comes with significant downsides that make cloud benefits counterproductive. Here are the key challenges that crop up in a multi-cloud environment and how to resolve them.

1. Integration challenges

The multi-cloud ecosystem involves a mix of public and private clouds and different vendors. Each vendor offers different solutions and service tiers. The lack of standards means that applications, workloads, and processes may not work the same way on each platform. On-premises or hybrid cloud tools and strategies remain ineffective in a multi-cloud environment. 

The complex tech landscape and architecture compound the challenge. The IT team has to walk a tightrope of resolving technical challenges while delivering optimal user experiences.

As solutions,

• Use an enterprise application gateway that supports integration across multiple clouds. A good, scalable API manager supports the demands of multi-cloud environments. Infrastructure-as-code adds a more programmatic layer to cloud infrastructure. 
• Use containers to bundle apps, dependencies, and services into lightweight packages. Tools such as Kubernetes and Docker make it easy to control multi-cloud workloads. 
• Use orchestration. Orchestration tools and frameworks automate the coordination and management of multi-cloud resources. Design critical business applications for redundancy by orchestrating across multiple workloads.
• Adopt data transformation tools to address the differences in models and schemas of different data sources.

2. Visibility challenges

The complexity of the multi-cloud environment causes visibility issues. Enterprise IT teams rarely have visibility on all their cloud resources. Lack of proper visibility hinders monitoring cloud resources for security and other issues. The implications include costs spiralling out of control and greater security risks.

Most cloud service providers offer integrated monitoring and management tools. But these tools do not offer access to every cloud-computing layer by default. Some providers offer managed services that abstract underlying infrastructure. All these make it hard to get visibility into the performance and behaviour of the connected services. Even without such abstraction, getting a holistic view of the system is difficult. Multiple services, instances, containers, and other resources remain spread across regions and providers. 

Different cloud providers have different monitoring and management tools. Managing multiple in-built monitoring tools at the same time becomes infeasible. 

All these lead to a lack of unified visibility and consistency. 

As solutions,

• Invest in cloud-native cross-platform application performance monitoring and management solutions. These tools aggregate data from multiple providers and services. It discovers and monitors application components, services, and dependencies. Centralised dashboards offer uniform and integrated views of the infrastructure. It also offers analytical insights into performance bottlenecks on the same view. 
• Standardise to create baseline affiliations across multiple platforms. For instance, if a company uses services from Azure and AWS, the dashboard monitors cost, rigour, and performance in one place. Such a tactic allows for level-field comparison.
• Tag resources for better visibility into resource consumption. This makes it easier to identify resource consumption and costs on different platforms and compare costs. 

3. Challenge of runaway costs

One of the reasons enterprises migrate to the cloud is for cost savings. For instance, cutting back on servers and eliminating on-premises data centres save operational costs in a big way. But ironically, a multi-cloud environment can increase costs if not managed effectively.

Multi-cloud risks sprawl and the set-up becomes unwieldy and unmanageable. Server sprawl occurs when enterprise users create servers for some use and then forget about it. Easy self-service models of provisioning cloud resources contribute to the trend. 

Another big cost area is distributing and synchronising data among different cloud platforms. Most cloud providers encourage customers to upload data for free or low cost but impose high exit costs. Cross-cloud costs add up fast and are also slow over the public cloud. Also, moving big data pipelines and analytics between cloud platforms can be complex and costly. It often requires rebuilding architecture configurations, CI/CD pipelines, and security aspects.

Even with sprawl and data service costs, the complexity of multi-cloud management attracts higher costs. Resolving networking, automation and security complexities requires specific knowledge about each cloud provider. Hiring and retaining such talent is tough, especially with the widespread talent crunch. Multi-cloud multiplies the costs. For instance, if a company has two cloud subscriptions, it might end up hiring people with expertise in both platforms.

As solutions,

• Keep the environment as simple as possible. Excessive agility can come at a cost if not managed well. The more the number of parts, the exponential increase in the risk and higher the maintenance costs. Use microservices to simplify the stack. 
• Use monitoring tools that consolidate all the cloud service subscriptions across multiple providers. Implement auto-scaling to adjust the size of instances, storage, and other resources. Most cloud providers offer cost management and optimisation tools. But in a multi-cloud environment, the enterprise may need third-party cost management tools. These tools integrate insights from multiple providers and offer more advanced recommendations.

4. Security challenges

Multi-cloud creates huge security and compliance gaps. 

Cloud computing involves a shared security model. The enterprise and cloud provider share responsibilities for specific cloud security aspects. The demarcation line varies from provider to provider. In a multi-cloud ecosystem, each vendor has different baselines and security models. There is no virtual private cloud abstraction capable of spanning these different clouds. This creates gaps in the security architecture and increases vulnerabilities. Also, multi-cloud widens the attack vector.

Effective security requires keeping applications resilient and hardened to withstand any attack. Applications with components and dependencies spread across multiple clouds make application hardening difficult. 

A multi-cloud environment increases the load and logistical challenges of patch management. System admins have to deal with the vulnerabilities, patch schedules, and update procedures of each platform. They also have to ensure all cloud instances remain on the same version. 

A multi-cloud environment also makes disaster recovery tricky. Each cloud provider may have proprietary methods, making an integrated approach a non-starter. 

Enterprises migrating workloads to the cloud often misconfigure security and privacy settings. Even the best network administrator makes mistakes. Vendors often give inadequate pre-migration training for complex configuration situations. The multi-cloud strategy increases such difficulties. System admins grapple with the challenges of multiple platforms.

Often, multi-cloud environments replace proven, time-tested, cohesive legacy IT infrastructures. Successful transition requires not disrupting the workflow. Any disruption unsettles a working system and creates vulnerabilities.

As solutions,

• Implement tools for continuous monitoring, intrusion detection, log analysis, and compliance reporting. Use third-party multi-cloud management solutions to integrate data from many providers.
• Security information and event management solutions centralise security data and provide real-time visibility. AI-powered tools monitor and analyse vast quantities of data for anomalies in real-time.
• Automated configuration management tools unearth issues cutting across cloud platforms, enabling proactive fixes.
• A centralised multi-cloud management solution monitors all cloud systems and tracks updates. IT teams can enforce controls and apply patches through such solutions.
• Complement the tools with a central framework that supports all cloud platforms. An effective framework enables applying security and access policies across the board.

5. Governance and user access challenges

Effective governance ensures applications, processes, and users have ready access to multi-cloud data. But ensuring efficient governance is not easy. 

The huge volumes of data make data governance challenging for any environment. It gets tougher in a multi-cloud environment as data increases exponentially and spreads out more. Keeping up with risk assessments and vetting additional cloud services pose major difficulties.

Multi-cloud environments also make access control difficult. Cloud providers offer in-built controls for user authorisation and access privileges. But the multi-cloud environment requires managing multiple user access systems simultaneously. Maintaining consistent policies across multiple platforms poses a huge logistical challenge.

As solutions,

• Establish clear data governance policies. Focus on “minimum viable governance” that defines only the minimum guidelines to balance costs, risks, and agility. But outline data ownership, access controls, lifecycle management, privacy regulations, and compliance requirements. Clarify who has access to sensitive data and clarify the consequences of non-compliance. 
• Implement a centralised data catalogue for a unified view of data assets across the multi-cloud environment. Co-opt information about data lineage, ownership, access permissions, and usage history.
• Enforce consistent access controls and authorisation mechanisms across clouds. Identity and access management (IAM) solutions restrict access to authorised users and applications.
• Make permissions temporary. Adopt a zero-trust model and make users re-request access every time.

Today’s evolving digital landscape makes multi-cloud environments a strategic imperative. Enterprises that overcome the challenges of the multi-cloud environment gain huge advantages.