Moving to a multi-cloud environment can bring many advantages, but it also brings huge challenges in managing both the everyday operations and security of multi-cloud infrastructures.
To meet these challenges, several approaches to multi-cloud management have arisen. The most common can be roughly grouped into three categories: Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs), Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and cloud-native abstraction. The differences between these approaches reflect the differences between top-down and bottom-up cloud management, as each management process suits a different set of companies.
In this article, we’ll take a look at all three approaches, explain what the advantages and disadvantages of each are and then explore whether new approaches to multi-cloud management are required.
CMPs are the highest level approach to cloud management—the approach that is furthest away from the native code that your clouds run on. The rise of CMPs has come as the result of a simple observation: public cloud services are redundant and overlapping, and can therefore be managed through an abstraction layer that hides the complexities of what is happening at a cloud-native level.
By using a CMP, admins do not need to understand the differences between AWS and Microsoft public clouds (for instance), but instead use a consistent interface to manage both.
This has some huge advantages, primarily when it comes to improving cloud security. CMPs allow IT operations teams to implement a common security layer within multi-cloud environments, and apply the same identity and access management (IAM) processes across all the clouds they are working with.
This is particularly useful with cross-cutting applications that interfaces with multiple, critical portions of your cloud storage to help simplify, and which requires highly complex user access policies. This is ultimately one of many reasons why security breaches of cloud-based data are so rare, as 99% of businesses in the UK that rely on cloud-based software have never experienced a security breach.
IaC is a second approach to multi-cloud management. This approach arose in response to utility computing and second-generation web frameworks, which gave rise to widespread scaling problems for small businesses.
Administrators took a pragmatic approach: they modeled their multi-cloud infrastructures with code, and were therefore able to write management tools that operated in a similar way to standard software.
IaC sits in between the other approaches on this list, and represents a compromise solution. It gives more fine-grained control over cloud management and security processes than a CMP, especially when used in conjunction with SaaS security vendors whose software can apply a consistent security layer to a software model of your cloud infrastructure. This is important because SaaS is growing rapidly in popularity, with 86% of organizations expected to have SaaS meeting the vast majority of their software needs within two years.
On the other hand, IaC requires a greater level of knowledge and vigilance than either CMP—or cloud-native approaches. If admins are knowledgeable enough to write code that can accurately (and reliably) model multi-cloud infrastructures, IaC can be a powerful way to improve DevOps security. These software models, however, will require constant monitoring to ensure that changes in the cloud-native layer do not introduce vulnerabilities into management tools.
Finally, IaC can be significantly more efficient, when it comes to computing and network resources, than a CMP. Because IaC software runs closer to the cloud-native layer than (most) CMPs, it can execute common tasks much more quickly.
The final approach to multi-cloud management is to manage your environment using only cloud-native tools. This approach has grown in popularity recently, as developers grew increasingly comfortable with working with containers and Kubernetes directly. Cloud storage providers have responded by offering increasingly complex tools designed to work directly on the cloud-native layer, and the storage provider you use should come with these tools.
Cloud native application management has several advantages, and several disadvantages. The most obvious advantage is that cloud-native tools give admins a much greater level of control over their multi-cloud environments than the other approaches on this list. Because these tools run natively, they are also typically faster and more efficient than the other approaches we’ve mentioned above.
On the other hand, saving computing time comes at the cost of increasing the workload for administrators. If you are working across a large number of clouds, managing each separately using each cloud’s native applications can quickly turn into a full-time job. In addition, managing multiple and complex access and usage policies at a cloud-native level can make it difficult for admins to keep on top of how their IAM processes are running, and increases the risk of mistakes.
All of the approaches above are a different solution to solve the same problem, namely the challenges caused by rapid adoption of multi-cloud technologies. Each, as we’ve seen, has a primary advantage when compared to the others. But in truth, none of the approaches above represents a completely adequate solution to managing security in multi-cloud environments.
The choice of which approach to take must therefore be a pragmatic one. For companies who are blessed with the knowledge, talent and time to manage multi-cloud infrastructures at a cloud-native level, this is likely to be the best solution, especially at a time when cloud waste is booming. If you take this approach, however, you should also be aware that implementing it will require putting in place thorough and rigorous code auditing processes in order to ensure that any small IaC elements that run on top of cloud-native tools do not introduce common security vulnerabilities into your network.
For small to medium size businesses, or those running hugely complex multi-cloud systems, CMPs will be a safer bet. The reduced efficiency of these services–both in terms of computing resources and capital investment–is likely to be more than made up for by the reduced load on the admins who spend their days working with them, and the reduction in the number of mistakes that are made.
Ultimately, it’s apparent that a new approach to multi-cloud management is required. One that combines the flexibility and speed of cloud-native with the ease of CMPs. But at the moment, it’s difficult to ascertain what that will look like.
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