Cloud computing continues to revolutionize the way businesses run. But the days of using a single cloud type or provider are long gone. Today’s organizations want the freedom to pick and choose cloud products and services from different vendors and providers. This has given rise to hybrid and multi-cloud environments that allow organizations to cherry-pick the clouds of their choice.
However, managing this complex cloud environment is not easy. Read on as we unravel the various tools AWS offers for effective hybrid and multi-cloud management.
The rise of hybrid and multi-cloud
Cloud computing has enabled businesses to enjoy a host of availability, flexibility, and scalability benefits. But the problem of vendor lock-in has plagued one and all.
Hybrid and multi-cloud environments enable organizations to overcome many of the issues traditionally associated with cloud computing. This is causing a massive surge in hybrid and multi-cloud adoption, with the hybrid cloud market expected to reach $173.33 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 22.5%.
Using a combination of two or more clouds or on-premises data centers, businesses can:
- Take full advantage of the cutting-edge technology offered by large cloud providers.
- Enjoy a higher degree of ownership over specific elements of their technology infrastructure.
- Enable better flexibility and scalability and grow and expand their business across geographies and technologies.
- Overcome the issue of vendor lock-in and seamlessly move between different cloud types and vendors for different business requirements.
- Improve infrastructure resiliency by eliminating a single point of failure and ensure 24/7 business operations.
- Drive faster deployment by selecting services from multiple vendors and build solutions more quickly.
- Reduce downtime by immediately and seamlessly shifting workloads to another cloud in case of an outage or interruption.
What AWS delivers
Hybrid and multi-cloud environments enable organizations to meet their business needs and deliver products and services more easily. But they also bring several management challenges to the table.
- How do organizations streamline vendor management?
- How do they ensure seamless data sharing between different clouds?
- How do they maintain their governance and security policies across this diverse ecosystem?
- How do they deliver seamless and consistent cloud experiences to users?
As a premier cloud vendor, AWS understands the benefits (and challenges) of hybrid and multi-cloud environments like no one else. Offering a wide array of modern tools and platforms, AWS ensures a consistent and secure cloud experience – regardless of how complicated the underlying environment is.
AWS solutions for hybrid and multi-cloud make it easy for organizations to manage and monitor their complex cloud ecosystems. With these solutions, businesses can:
- Simplify and centralize cloud infrastructure management across hybrid cloud environments and ensure alignment with resources on other clouds.
- Centralize monitoring of workflows, processes, data, and users across multiple clouds and get end-to-end visibility into the performance and availability of cloud workloads.
- Conduct real-time data analysis across multiple cloud environments and make quick, high-quality data-driven business decisions.
- Ensure robust identity and access management through the implementation of necessary security and data protection policies and guidelines.
- Offer consistent cloud experiences to users, regardless of the cloud type, location, device, or purpose.
Exploring AWS solutions for hybrid and multi-cloud
AWS offers a plethora of solutions for hybrid and multi-cloud management. With these solutions, organizations can simplify infrastructure provisioning, centralize management, and extend cloud operations across multiple cloud environments. They can also ensure the right levels of security and compliance through continuous monitoring and observability.
Let’s look at some AWS solutions that make hybrid and multi-cloud management a breeze:
AWS Systems Manager
AWS Systems Manager offers everything you need to effectively manage your hybrid and multi-cloud workloads. Such centralized management helps improve the visibility (and control) of resources and applications. It also improves system diagnosis and allows cloud administrators to quickly remediate operational issues before they impact users.
As a secure, end-to-end solution, AWS Systems Manager further helps automate critical processes such as updating and patching virtual machines.
AWS Config
With AWS Config, organizations can seamlessly and efficiently monitor cloud configuration changes. Through continuous assessment and evaluation, they can simplify change management and maintain compliance standards.
AWS Config also aids in simplifying operational troubleshooting and monitoring hybrid and multi-cloud environments for potential vulnerabilities.
Amazon CloudWatch
When it comes to complex cloud environments, observability is a must. Amazon CloudWatch facilitates the process of unearthing insights into the performance and health of resources running in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Cloud administrators can use powerful visualization tools to access and analyze application data and boost operational performance via automated actions.
Amazon OpenSearch Service
Amazon OpenSearch Service allows for real-time monitoring of hybrid and multi-cloud applications and infrastructure. It allows cloud teams to perform interactive log analytics and systematically detect (and resolve) potential threats.
Using OpenSearch Dashboards, they can also visualize log and trace data and receive intelligent, machine learning-powered results for anomaly detection and search relevance ranking.
Amazon Security Lake
Managing security controls and policies across diverse cloud environments is never easy. Amazon Security Lake centralizes data from an array of AWS, SaaS, on-premises, and cloud environments and helps improve the protection of workloads, applications, and data.
By centralizing data from various sources, organizations can streamline data management at scale, simplify compliance monitoring and reporting, and facilitate security investigations.
AWS Identity and Access Management
AWS IAM aids in the secure management of user identities and permissions to hybrid and multi-cloud resources. Using this tool, cloud administrators can set and manage fine-grained access guardrails for complex cloud environments and centrally handle, update, and refine identities. They can either set the least privilege access on a per-account basis or across all AWS accounts and applications.
AWS DataSync
In hybrid and multi-cloud environments, data needs to move freely and securely between different environments. AWS DataSync makes it possible for teams to move data between AWS, on-premises file systems, and other cloud storage services.
Organizations can seamlessly migrate data between different environments with end-to-end encryption and validation. As a fully managed service, AWS DataSync minimizes costly migration expenses while enabling seamless scalability as data volumes grow.
AWS Snow Family
As organizations collect and store humongous amounts of data, analyzing these large data sets at the edge becomes a critical priority. AWS Snow Family devices facilitate the movement of data to and from cloud environments while also conducting efficient data processing at the edge.
These purpose-built devices allow organizations to cost-effectively shift workloads and data and make the most of high-security compute and storage capabilities.
Wrapping up
AWS solutions for hybrid and multi-cloud environments play a huge role in simplifying and centralizing complex cloud operations. From daily management to periodic governance and real-time observability to around-the-clock security and data analytics, AWS tools deliver a consistent cloud experience to users across different cloud environments, on-premises systems, and edge networks.
Engage with an AWS managed services partner today to maximize ROI from your hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
