Why your next IT discovery tool must include support for multi-cloud
Table of Contents
- Multi-cloud – is it the new normal? Here’s what you need to know
- Multi-cloud discovery – a new way forward
- Getting the maximum value out of your cloud investments and assets
- Make the right choice for your business with Virima
- Want to know more about our multi-cloud support discovery?
Your Next IT Discovery Tool ‘MUST’ Include Support for Multi-Cloud
According to the predictions by Gartner, over 75% of midsize and large organizations will adopt a multi-cloud IT discovery support or hybrid IT strategy in 2021. Companies across the world are increasingly turning to the cloud to improve performance and scalability. With the major cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and others offering scale, security, and accessibility, more and more enterprises are adopting the ‘cloud-first’ approach.
The point here is that you may or may not have your apps on the cloud right now. But at some point, you will have to make the move.
Whether on private, public, or hybrid cloud, or with Multi-cloud IT Discovery support, the IT environment is dynamically complex. Recognizing this shift is crucial; the present IT landscape is more intricate than it was a few years ago. That being said, your management capabilities will have to be upgraded to keep up with the change. Or face the threat of becoming obsolete in the near future.
Multi-cloud – is it the new normal? Here’s what you need to know
Essentially, multi-cloud refers to the use of multiple public clouds from different service providers. You don’t necessarily need a hybrid cloud environment to function. But you can have Multi-cloud IT Discovery support as part of your hybrid cloud.
Now, let us look at the challenges of multi-cloud. Multi-cloud can be overwhelming for IT managers and with a complex mix of fragmented environments. Also, it can lead to complications, spiraling costs, and confusion. The primary concerns for enterprises are that of security, reliability, and performance in a multi-cloud environment. Therefore, the foremost step would be to mitigate these challenges by creating a consolidated view of business and IT performance across all cloud instances that are functioning at any given time. And while it sounds fairly easy, the complexities of IT environments arising from the following must be addressed.
- Vast amounts of data, applications, and infrastructure being moved to the cloud
- Different cloud deployment models like public, private, or hybrid
- Confidentiality and complexity issues of workloads being moved to the cloud
Even as more companies adopt Multi-cloud IT Discovery support and cloud-native infrastructure for gaining cost advantage or strategic flexibility, leaders will need better and faster IT tools to discover and manage cloud resources to ensure better service levels and visibility.
Multi-cloud discovery – a new way forward
There are multiple initiatives for holistic cloud management but one of the most underrated is discovery. While you may not have multi-cloud discovery on your list of priorities during your transition to a hybrid or multi-cloud environment, it plays a vital role in managing all the moving pieces as you grow your footprint in the cloud.
With multi-cloud discovery, you can get the necessary information to enable proper configuration management processes. In fact, with a well-defined multi-cloud discovery initiative, you should be able to:
- Maintain an accurate inventory of cloud infrastructure multiple environments and providers
- Have visibility into every virtualized operating system including patches and installed software
- Understand all application dependencies and how multi-cloud support business services
- Include cloud assets as configuration items (CI) within the CMDB to maintain proper ITSM processes
- Leverage CI’s and relationships to get support from multi-cloud support for decision making (e.g., change approval or release planning) and resolve incidents and problems quickly
- Ensure your servers are being patched and know when new systems and processes are spun up, how they relate to each other, and how they evolve over time
- Provide the means and processes to secure application/service availability, quality and security
While these capabilities are ideal for any environment, they become critical when you move to the cloud. As you deploy more applications using various cloud services, determining streamlined multi-cloud discovery based on the above objectives will help you optimize costs and reduce the risks related to security, compliance, and performance availability.
Getting the maximum value out of your cloud investments and assets
Cloud discovery is gaining momentum in discussions around cloud planning and migration because it helps you extract maximum value out of your cloud investments and removes
Some features to consider while choosing your next IT discovery tool:
- The platform should cover your entire cloud migration journey from data center discovery, application dependency mapping, resource planning, migration strategy and execution, in-flight and post migration service delivery.
- The platform must incorporate multi-cloud discovery capabilities to gain visibility across other cloud providers, on-premise inventory and discover resources such as projects, images and service accounts utilizing RESTful APIs. A well-executed multi-cloud discovery initiative is an imperative for your enterprise to uphold governance, risk management and compliance standards.
- Many open-source discovery tools come with features like network discovery to discover cloud-native infrastructure and applications.
If you’re still using on-premises legacy systems or in a hybrid environment, you need a tool that can efficiently move on-premises workloads to the cloud by fully discovering all infrastructure workloads and consolidating the information into relevant business services automatically. This will help your company prioritize and evaluate workloads to be moved to the cloud.
- Your multi-cloud management solution should be able to help you maintain operations, provide insights into a variety of cloud-related functions and set up one CMDB to centralize all configuration information, helping you implement efficient ITSM processes.
- You should be able to get a detailed analysis of a cloud’s behavior through the platform. Monitoring and analyzing key metrics to improve performance or reliability are also essential features.
- Integration with security is another primary feature to assign AWS EC2 and Azure Virtual Machine instances automatically to managed security groups and operate seamlessly within the current cloud security infrastructure.
Make the right choice for your business with Virima
If you’re embarking on a cloud planning and migration program, it is important for you to start by assessing your applications physical requirements to determine what is a good candidate for the cloud and what resources will be required once there. You will also want to fully understand and document application dependencies and their role to the broader services which they support. This will help determine move groups and priorities but also help to ensure you are not exposing other apps and services to performance and security risks during and post migration.
Another consideration is how you will support apps and services in-flight and after they land in the cloud. Whatever documentation you had before about your service environment is out the window. A proper discovery tool will keep up with the changes and make sure decisions and actions are based on solid data. Ideally the discovery tool is also keeping your CMDB up to date so not to interfere with regular ITSM processes. See my recent blog 5 Reasons Why Cloud Assets Should be in the CMDB.
We understand the complications of today’s cloud environment and can work closely with your team to define the right discovery capabilities to meet your business objectives.
Leveraging Virima Discovery for your cloud and on-premise environments will vastly improve your ability to properly define and construct your multi-cloud deployment strategy. Irrespective of the stage of your cloud migration journey, our discovery and dependency mapping technology and expertise helps you get a comprehensive view of your cloud deployments and brings down the cost and hassle of supporting multiple environments, regardless of where they reside. Simply put, Virima takes the guesswork out of your cloud deployment.
Want to know more about our multi-cloud support discovery?
Connect with the experts at Virima and empower your business with the same accuracy, scale, and security in the cloud environment as your traditional on-premises data centers.
Virima’s IT Discovery, IT Asset Management (ITAM), and IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions can help you maximize the value of business processes and service management investments. Virima features can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and the interconnections that link them to one another, your applications and services, and your users.
Learn more about Virima’s IT and service management solutions online, or contact Virima today.