You’ve probably heard the “do more with less” edict more often than you wanted to in your profession. But what about the “do more with more” directive? It’s a much less popular expression that few have ever heard because it’s kind of obvious—you should be able to do more with more.
At least, it’s obvious if everyone assumes that both the first and second “more” are good. But what if one or both “mores” are not always good? Any parent of multiple children knows all too well what happened when one child became two or three or four to care for: They had to do more of everything—more groceries, more clothing, and more mess—and had to tolerate more chaos. What about when one cloud becomes multiclouds overnight with a new combination of public, private, and hybrid clouds plus co-los?
Obviously, with more “good” clouds working together, you get to do more “good” stuff and do things better, faster, more easily, and more cheaply. Everything is awesome! You don’t have any challenges or problems at all. In fact, IT professionals in multicloud environments really have it made. Need I say more? Is your sarcasm radar pinging?
Not to worry. As CIO.com noted in a post by VMware Cloud Management Business Unit Senior Director Mark Leake, there are plenty of multicloud management challenges stemming from complexity. Leake writes that the scope and scale of management have exploded into countless moving parts. That in turn stresses siloed teams, who have different cloud constructs, different operational definitions of the services provided by those clouds, different security and compliance policies, and different tools, all of which leads to a lack of holistic visibility. Plenty of challenges to go around.
Knowing More
NETSCOUT Director of Product Management Eric Smith, Principal Premium Services Engineer Adam O’Toole, and Area Vice President of Strategic Marketing Michael Segal have a lot to say about what’s needed to meet and overcome the novel challenges of operating in multicloud environments in “Succeeding in the Multi-Cloud Modern World,” part of our Problem Solvers Series. They discuss how operating in multicloud environments impacts existing processes, methodologies, and thinking around application performance, availability, and security. The good news is that they also discuss how to create visibility strategies and architectures that scale for any software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment to meet the technical and business objectives for efficient and effective multicloud operations.
Some of the problems that Smith, O’Toole, and Segal identify within a multicloud existence include drastically larger attack surfaces; longer delays in discovering the root cause of service or availability; blind spots to essential parts of the infrastructure or traffic flows; and recalibrating existing technology, tools, and responsibilities. They also do a great job explaining the increased complexity and risk of multicloud and the dynamic and changing nature of workloads, and even introduce some novel ways to describe what really is a supercloud because applications are hosted in multiple clouds and running across co-los, data centers, and several public clouds.
All three experts have good insights about essential success factors for multicloud prosperity. One key consideration for organizations is that they need to collaborate more closely in multicloud environments to ensure better information sharing. They also must plan with specificity for how to migrate, assure, and troubleshoot in multicloud environments and understand how that will differ from existing methods and processes.
Actionable Intelligence at Your Fingertips
Smith, O’Toole, and Segal also discuss the critical need in multicloud designs for having a data source that can serve as actionable intelligence across clouds, co-los, and all edges. They offer their views on how NETSCOUT’s nGenius Performance Management platform provides a scalable deep-packet inspection approach for real-time, continuous visibility in multicloud environments to acquire packets efficiently, convert them to actionable intelligence, and identify the root cause of performance problems within a few clicks of the mouse.
So, learn how to “do more with more” clouds in a multicloud landscape and why comprehensive, real-time visibility across private, public, hybrid, and multicloud environments is a winning strategy for success in protecting and securing performance, availability, and the user experience.
See how to overcome the novel challenges of operating in multicloud environments in “Succeeding in the Multi-Cloud Modern World,” part of our Problem Solvers Series.