As multi-clouds become the norm, finding and addressing wasteful cloud resources jump to the top of the list of IT concerns. Keeping cloud management simple, timely, and accurate requires a view into your application usage that is clear and comprehensive.

Hybrid clouds give organisations the ability to get the best of both worlds: on-premises for traditional apps and resources they want to keep close at hand, and in the public cloud to realise the speed, agility, and efficiency of cloud-native applications. The challenge is to maintain the optimal balance between public and private clouds to achieve your business objectives. Doing so requires a 360-degree view of the full application lifecycle.

Companies need to evaluate multi-cloud management platforms and orchestration tools which can take the mystery out of hybrid IT by giving an up-to-date view of resource utilisation without slowing down DevOps activities. According to a recent survey of CIOs and IT managers, 37 percent of respondents identified unpredictable costs as their greatest cloud concern, topped only by security.

Sharpening your view into critical operations

According to studies conducted by ISACA Research, one out of three organisations doesn't calculate cloud computing ROI. This study identifies three "core IT activities" that must be monitored regularly and accurately:

• Quickly spinning up new cloud environments or adapting old ones 
• Providing the right services to the right people at the lowest cost possible
• Keeping those user services and app stacks reliable, secure, and stable

Gaining visibility into application health is one of the top four challenges of multi-cloud management, topped only by security and performance concerns.

The benefits of visibility into all your workloads — in the cloud and on-premises — is demonstrated by an accounting application, which has peaks and valleys of activity in standard business cycles. 

One of the greatest impacts of enhanced visibility into application performance and health is the ability of CIOs to partner with the business units that rely on the apps. Knowing how cloud and non-cloud resources are being used in the organisation allows CIOs to recommend specific platforms and services, keep tabs on the inevitable shadow IT projects, and have a more thorough knowledge of what the business units need. 

Bringing monitoring and logging into a consolidated view across clouds with an orchestration platform like Morpheus unlocks the ability to detect app stack outages, scale across platforms and clouds, and otherwise assure day-2 production application tasks are first class citizens within the deployment phase of the app lifecycle. 

Too often, Biz Dev and Ops are three separate functions. However having full view of multi-cloud operations and the ability to provide services to both business stakeholders and developers on demand can elevate the IT Ops team to a position of business value rather than business frustration.

An opportunity for DevOps to drive the business to new heights

The continuous integration/continuous (CI/CD) delivery nature of DevOps is taking organisations by storm. DevOps teams think in terms of application portability and velocity, which means applications are built independently of where they will live [and] move across the continuum of on-prem, private and public clouds with complete transparency to end users.

There's only one way to achieve such a level of end-user transparency in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments: via a single unified interface that is shared by all of the teams that touch the app life cycle. The growing popularity of multi-cloud management platforms such as Morpheus is due in large part to the increasing demand for a single, comprehensive view of diverse public cloud and private cloud services.

It must go beyond a unified interface though. Organisations using configuration management tools as part of their orchestration flow can track configuration state changes in development and then enforce an identical state of dependencies through test and production. When coupled with self-service provisioning, organisations are able to quickly tear down and refresh the entire pipeline at any time because everything is stored and managed as code.

Unified multi-cloud management lets teams execute workflows and determine the best execution venue for workloads by identifying the optimal platform based on cost, reliability, and service portfolio. The single point of control the services provide means users have new levels of order and visibility into multi-cloud environments and governance.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.