Multi-cloud management, multi-cloud strategies, modern apps, and hybrid platforms are not just buzzwords. Your organization must deal with multiple cloud platforms to identify and filter capabilities to enhance business outcomes.
Now, it means you need employees who can understand the ins and outs of every cloud platform and its capabilities and can manage them effortlessly. With upskilling and reskilling, your team can survive the multi-cloud environment and solve real-world problems.
This blog will run you through why your business needs multi-cloud management, the benefits of multi-cloud, the skill sets needed to thrive in multi-cloud, and certifications to support your team’s growth.
Let’s dive in.
Why do organizations care about multi-cloud strategies?
As remote work continues, so does the dependency on the cloud and the focus on abilities to manage capabilities. To solve emerging business problems and achieve organizational objectives, you might have to club functionalities of various cloud platforms and manage expenses, geographical availability, etc.
For instance, you may choose GCP for coding and testing, Azure for network reliability, and AWS for scalability and high availability. It can also be a combination of PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS. To support these services, mega-vendors have slowly started capturing market share and helping build your ecosystem by cherry-picking the relevant and best-of-breed solutions from each popular cloud platform.
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Some major multi-cloud providers include IBM, Hashicorp Terraform, Open Stack, Cloudify, etc.
Why adopt multi-cloud strategies?
Companies choose a single cloud platform to fulfill initial setup requirements for their businesses. But as you scale, you notice there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. You need solutions that best fit each need and align with your company goals, often leading to a multi-cloud strategy.
In addition, you would like to include either several clouds from different vendors (homogenous cloud) or multiple cloud services from multiple vendors (heterogeneous infrastructure). By pooling in the best services, managers can boost the efficiency of capital spent, increase operational accuracy, and optimize performance by manifolds.
Moreover, multi-cloud offers a great deal of security, availability, and stability as you can get visibility, upgraded solutions, easy monitoring, authorization, configs, authentication, compliance across clouds, and consolidated monitoring, all under one umbrella.
Benefits of multi-cloud platforms
You can avoid vendor lock-in
Businesses that put their resources or applications on a sole cloud vendor have experienced considerable difficulty moving their operations to new services. Because the company only uses one cloud, changing its program frequently causes them to increase its investment, which makes switching from one cloud to another challenging.
However, if a company is currently utilizing multiple clouds, migrating resources and workloads between them is straightforward and give them access to the latest technology from the providers of their choice.
Improved disaster recovery
Multi-cloud backups enable greater backup access. You may rely on other cloud service providers to keep your data safe even if one of them crashes.
Reduced Capex
A data center needs numerous infrastructures, equipment, and power supplies that are expensive to purchase outright, which means less funding for ongoing corporate operations if there are more.
Adopting multi-cloud strategies allows you to free up your Capex and allocate for something more flexible, reliable, and scalable.
You enjoy enhanced security
We all know that cloud service providers are in charge of their own environment, and they always make sure to have all the tools necessary to protect your data. More platforms means more eyes screening the movements on your ecosystem who will always alert you of suspicious entries and threats.
Reduced latency
Other benefits for multi-cloud users include workload optimization due to the new feature they employ for each service provider, which enhances apps’ performances and increases cost-efficiency.
Better risk management
A multi-cloud user can easily transition from one cloud provider to another if a system malfunctions or is attacked. Moreover, they can mitigate risks by using redundant and independent systems that ensure robust config methods, vulnerability testing, and other features for better risk handling.
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How can your team prepare for the multi-cloud universe?
Training in multi-cloud is no longer a choice; it’s a deal breaker since 51% of business operations rely on apps implemented across multiple vendors.
Organizations have to deal with numerous facets, viz., customer engagement, research, finance, development, etc., that legacy or single cloud solutions cannot solve. It would help if you had your team seamlessly switch to multi-cloud strategies to meet the diverse requirements of clients, businesses, and teams.
Why does your team need to upskill in a multi-cloud universe?
The majority of industries are now experiencing talent scarcity. So existing employees can focus even more on developing cutting-edge skills and techniques that will benefit more teams throughout their organization.
Moreover, upskilling in multi-cloud will help improve the bottom line of IT teams. Here’s how:
- Reduced time spent on designing infrastructure.
- Plummeting operational costs
- Less time and effort are required to provision compute resources.
- Lower downtime of tier-one apps
- Fewer security breaches
- Faster migration of workloads
How can your team navigate the multi-cloud universe?
We all know how and why IT teams are going to lengths to deploy multi-cloud, modern apps to migrate workloads and hybrid platforms to manage both on-prem and cloud infrastructures.
To meet the growing team’s needs and upskill and re-skill in multi-cloud management, you need new ways to roll out technical processes and onboard your employees.
Here are a few key skill sets you must focus on to ensure a smooth transition to multi-cloud.
CI/CD for operational efficiency
Your enterprise app development teams or IT experts may have a hard time getting a hold of multi-cloud development. Usually, what happens with multi-cloud implementations is that they rely on hundreds of remote apps and infrastructure components.
These elements, in turn, may use countless orchestrations and interfaces and then execute the same in numerous cloud environments with varying degrees of interoperability.
Therefore, to ensure that there are no roadblocks in CI/CD pipelines of apps and architecture across heterogeneous cloud platforms, your team must acquire and master DevOps tech that seamlessly integrates with all types of cloud solutions. They should also permit flexibility, easy migration, increased monitoring, scalability, management, and transparency of workflows, data, business logic, components, etc.
Recovery, resilience, and backup to increase security
Since numerous cloud platforms are involved, the chances are half of your organizational data is unchecked and is staying in silos. It means you don’t have time to see if there are any activities or monitor movements, let alone enhance the security levels, giving full room to hackers and malwares to breach critical resources.
Therefore, it becomes essential for your team to learn how to develop a centralized solution to aggregate data across multi-cloud platforms and prevent malicious attacks or unethical usage. Employees would also need to know abilities like:
- Enable increased visibility across all cloud platforms
- Centralize data for multi-cloud and prevent silos
- Automating cloud actions as much as possible
- Develop cloud-native apps to streamline activities
- Keeping mission-critical info in archive tiers
Optimize multi-cloud services
Optimizing services for multi-cloud environments is one of the critical aspects of multi-cloud management. Your team must know which services align with the organizational needs and how to leverage them. The best practice here is to build a cloud center of excellence to support and streamline multi-cloud activities.
Additionally, employees should be well-versed with:
- Optimizing workload distribution between public and private clouds.
- Mapping SLAs of cloud environments.
- Managing integration gaps
- Establishing automation framework
- Managing cloud interconnection services
Monitor app performance
For each cloud service provider, you need to monitor the capabilities and performance within the ecosystem. When developing new cloud-based apps, consider both third-party vendors and the monitoring tools the cloud service provider offers for your observability and monitoring requirements.
Your team should also be able to visualize and track multi-cloud monitoring information.
- Map availability zones
- Analyze performance metrics with the Host Map
- Filter and aggregate full-stack data from siloed infrastructures through key-value pair tags
- Keep containers and dynamic hosts tagged for scaling
Multi-cloud cost optimization
Expenses are quintessential for multi-cloud. Justifying the dollars spent on multi-cloud services is both critical and challenging. When the monthly expenses start to arrive, the real problems begin. Enterprises must prioritize cost reduction and low latency to profit from multi-cloud architecture fully.
Here are a few tricks your employees would need to learn how:
- Refrain over-provisioning of multi-cloud data
- Splitting data between different storage layers
- Cleanup and monitor resources
- Segregating prod and non-prod bills
- Identifying relevant cloud services
Top certifications for upskilling in multi-cloud
The best way to upskill in a multi-cloud universe is to go through certifications and training programs. All major cloud platforms offer numerous courses to help your team understand the nuances of multi-cloud management and navigate through solutions smoothly. Let’s have a quick look.
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Linux Foundation had first launched the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) program to help extend the Kubernetes environment. It uses standardized training and certification and validates your skills to design, develop, expose, and configure cloud-native apps for Kubernetes. Eligibility: hands-on with container runtimes and microservices architecture.
CompTIA Cloud+
The CompTIA Cloud+ or CV0-003 certification validates your proficiency for roles in data centers. The cert will help you deep dive into cloud design, architecture, optimizing, maintaining, and troubleshooting for cloud management issues. Eligibility: knowledge of CompTIA Server+ and Network+ along with work experience of 2-3 years in system administration.
Google cloud certified fellow hybrid multi-cloud
The Google Cloud Certified Fellow program is for expert technical leaders and cloud architects with core experience in building enterprise solutions. The program honors individuals with a high level of technical proficiency and can use Anthos and Google Cloud to translate business needs into tech solutions. As an advocate for Anthos and someone who is actively involved in the community, you should have a significant effect in the public eye.
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AWS-certified security specialty
AWS-certified security specialty or SCS-C01 course helps you find and nurture individuals with the necessary skills for deploying cloud operations. The course validates your proficiency in securing workloads on the AWS Cloud. Eligibility: at least 5 years of experience in IT security and building and implementing security solutions.
Microsoft Certified: Azure network engineer associate
Microsoft Certified: Azure network engineer associate or AZ-700 cert helps you develop abilities to deploy, plan, and maintain Azure networking solutions, like hybrid connectivity, networking, routing, security, and private access to Azure apps. You also learn how to build solutions using Azure portal, PowerShell, Azure CLI, and ARM templates to enhance performance, scalability, resiliency, and security. Eligibility: working knowledge of Azure networking tools.
Google-certified professional cloud network engineer
Professional Cloud Network Engineers implement and manage network architectures in the Google Cloud. They collaborate with architects who create the cloud infrastructure on cloud teams.
To ensure successful cloud setups, the Cloud Network Engineers use the Google Cloud Console or CLI and draw on skills with network solutions, app, and container networking, hybrid and multi-cloud accessibility, developing VPCs, and reliability for existing internet architectures. Eligibility: work experience of 3+ years in IT and 1+ years in managing and building solutions for Google cloud.
Summary
Hope this blog helps you understand the significance of multi-cloud strategies for your business, find a direction to upskill your team for a multi-cloud universe, and develop the right abilities for smooth navigation.
However, speaking of upskilling, you will find myriad courses and certifications from all major cloud providers and leading platforms. But you may find it overwhelming to filter out the relevant, authentic, and upgraded courses for your team.
With this in mind, Whizlabs brings you countless courses to train your employees for multi-cloud management. They can upskill themselves with planned training programs, curated video lectures and practice papers designed by industry experts, hands-on labs to put theory to practice, and sandboxes to understand cloud environments better.
Does this intrigue you? Reach out to us today to learn more about how you can create the right learning path for your team and onboard them on multi-cloud culture.
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