Management Complexity In The Multi-cloud

Organisations are turning to the public, hybrid and multi-cloud to accelerate digital transformation. A 2015 Oxford Economics Survey entitled ‘The Cloud Grows Up’ shows that 69 percent of global business leader and IT executive respondents planned to make moderate to heavy cloud investments over the next three years; not only to save money, but to enter new markets and develop new products, services, lines of business and business models fast.

But one of the biggest challenges of hybrid and multi-clouds is achieving visibility, performance and management across the entire complex estate. You can wrestle with multiple cloud-provided tools and instrumentation, but that can be time consuming and frustrating.

Holistic visibility

However, there is a surprisingly simple path to holistic visibility; the application delivery infrastructure. Chances are, if you’re deploying Web and other applications across the hybrid or multi-cloud you’re leveraging application delivery solutions to maintain application performance as workloads grow and shrink over time. And the Application Delivery Controller (ADC) has evolved to deliver a number of other important network functions as well, including authentication, SSL termination and application level firewalls.

The traditional ADC was a physical appliance, requiring power, cooling and network cabling. In today’s virtual environment its functions are increasingly deployed as atomized software which can be spun up on demand across a hybrid network infrastructure. A comprehensive, centralized ADC management tool could help deliver visibility, performance, flexibility, security, compliance and business continuity across all ADC components–including the servers and applications they monitor–spanning the private and public cloud estate.

Such a ‘single pane of glass’ would offer invaluable help when IT seeks to migrate applications and services across clouds and data centres or trace and address performance, security and other issues across the estate. Some newer solutions even integrate with software defined networks to deliver network visibility as well; certainly a much simpler and more effective strategy than wrestling with multiple cloud, network and data centre management tools.

This article was contributed by Maurice McMullin from KEMP Technologies

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