From Tetris to Triumph: Navigating Cloud Complexity with Strategic Planning

Planning a cloud strategy is a bit like playing infrastructure Tetris. It is a behemoth task where multiple moving parts need to come together to create a single picture. This is especially true for IT shops that aren’t reliant on a single environment but rather support a mix of on-premises and public cloud resources. The reason this is a challenge is because to ensure data mobility, transparency, and data protection across a myriad of environments is complex and costly. Two words no IT manager or CIO want bandied about their boardroom table.

Cloud success all comes down to getting the planning right. Knowing where to move data, understanding how to best safeguard this data, and ensuring that data movement and orchestration are documented and planned will negate unnecessary upsets like not knowing where a primary dataset resides. This is also true for a cloud-native business that now needs to move data back home because of potential compliance and data sovereignty issues. Costs can spiral out of control if requirements for on-premises infrastructure aren’t carefully metered out.

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index found that nearly every organisation (99%) has moved one or more applications to a different IT infrastructure in the past year, and the vast majority (86%) agree that moving applications is both complex and costly, 56% plan gain more visibility into their cloud consumption and costs this year and 52% will aim to minimise cloud waste.

As a CIO there are so many considerations that need to be factored in. But let’s start with four areas that can help you keep cloud complexity and costs under control and the wolves away from the boardroom door.

1. Keep your head in the cloud but your feet on the ground

To fully leverage the advantages of cloud computing, organisations must set realistic expectations and plan carefully. Contrary to the common misconception that an application can seamlessly switch between AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform in a single day, the reality is that adopting a multicloud approach is a gradual process that unfolds over several months or even years.

By developing a cloud operating model with this long-term perspective, businesses can enjoy the flexibility of using multiple cloud providers without incurring the unnecessary costs and complexities of rushing the process. With the right expectations in place, a hybrid multicloud strategy becomes not only feasible and cost-effective but also highly advantageous.

2. Be paranoid, check everything three times, prepare to standardise

Public cloud environments differ significantly from traditional on-premises infrastructure, necessitating a shift in how organisations approach them—particularly in terms of security. While a secure perimeter with open internal access might work for on-premises setups, this approach can lead to serious vulnerabilities in the cloud. In the public cloud host-based security methods become increasingly vital.

Implementing automation and standardisation across all cloud resources and services ensures the consistent application of security measures and reduces the time needed to detect unauthorised activities. Additionally, organisations must address the non-technical aspect: the importance of training and educating their teams. Ensuring that all departments are aligned on security practices is crucial for effective collaboration on security initiatives.

3. Make flexibility and optionality a priority

The public cloud is an ideal starting point for innovation. However, as companies explore the public cloud and see success with a smaller set of applications, they must recognise that, for most applications, the public cloud will generally be more costly than running them on-premises or potentially on another cloud. To prevent vendor lock-in it’s essential for enterprises to build flexibility and optionality into their infrastructure allowing for the migration of compute resources and the ability to transfer data out of public clouds when necessary. While organisations with ample cloud engineering expertise might manage this independently, the majority will need a platform specifically designed to support the mobility of data and computation.

4. Let others fail and learn from their mistakes (and costly losses)

As organisations embark on their hybrid multicloud journey, there are several best practices to keep in mind. These include wrapping key application capabilities with APIs, containerising modern applications for greater portability, and automating application deployments through CI/CD pipelines to minimise manual errors and lower costs.

While public clouds have been around for nearly 15 years and the principles of cloud design are now well understood, companies must still be strategic in how they use the public cloud for specific applications or workloads. For instance, while modernising a legacy application portfolio might seem appealing in theory, it is often too costly and fails to deliver a return on investment—opting for a lift-and-shift approach is typically more practical for legacy applications. Watch others, learn from them, and plot a path for your business.

The innovation barometer

The advantages of using a single platform to manage workloads across clouds, on-premises, and the edge are clear: greater flexibility, improved performance, enhanced compliance, increased agility, and more.

But before you move your data out of your basement and into its treehouse in the sky, plan, learn from others, and don’t underestimate the complexity that lies ahead. If you do, your new shiny multi-cloud environment could be the perfect place for innovation.

Main Image: Infra360