By Jeff Kukowski, CEO, CloudBolt Software

Enterprises need a multi-cloud approach to stay competitive and drive innovation. But as multi-cloud architectures grow increasingly large and complex, governance, visibility and security become increasingly difficult.

Seventy-eight percent of IT leaders say they have limited insight into where cost inefficiencies lie, which employees are provisioning resources and what those resources are, or where security vulnerabilities exist and how to remediate them. There is no ability to see all cloud usage in a single place, or isolate it by cloud provider, department, or individual user. If you can't see problems, you can't fix them. So the costs  potential exposure) just keep increasing.

A multi-cloud approach is becoming the norm, either by grand design but more often by accident or acquisition. It's the reality for a majority of companies now. And because of the inherent complexities caused by disparate controls and reporting, organizations are willing to eat millions worth of cloud spend that they either can't track or don't know about, and justify it as "the cost of innovation."

But it's not the cost of innovation - it's the cost of inefficiency.

The Multi-Cloud Money Pit

It's a common situation in multi-cloud enterprises: siloed development teams utilize multiple cloud vendors and keep adding new cloud tools, many of which may not be centralized or standardized. This creates sprawl, limits visibility, and broadens threat surfaces.

Since each cloud provider operates in its own way with its own systems, there is precious little visibility or interoperability between them. Data from each cloud has to be collected and aggregated by multiple people with spreadsheets, a time-consuming process that's prone to error. If your organization uses AWS, Azure, GCP and on-prem systems, you have data from four different systems you need to have the expertise to use, track, collect data, aggregate and analyze. By the time reports can be delivered to key stakeholders, the data is likely weeks old and riddled with inaccuracies from human error and the limitations of manual data parsing.

Not only that, but many new tools have to be custom integrated - a long and expensive process that usually involves third-party contractors. Custom coding leaves plenty of opportunities for misconfigurations, which account for roughly two thirds of all cyber security breaches. And on top of all that, shadow IT running in the background constantly drains money. Gartner even estimates that shadow IT accounts for 30-40% of all enterprise IT spend.

Plugging the Hole

Luckily, there are actionable best practices enterprises can adopt to gain better visibility and control over cloud costs while enhancing innovation and efficiency.

Connect all clouds and control them from a single place. Instead of a nebulous patchwork of clouds that need to be managed from different consoles with different procedures, quirks and visibility tools, enterprises need an overarching framework. With a framework approach, all clouds are connected and interoperable, and can be managed from a single console with universal commands and controls that work seamlessly across all platforms. Enterprises can pinpoint waste and inefficiencies and collect data in real time from all sources, eliminating the need for spreadsheets and manual data aggregation.

Tear down walls between teams. Enterprises could have hundreds of disconnected development teams, all procuring and integrating their own tools, with no alignment or communication between them. If one team obtains a tool, integrates it, and vastly improves some process with it, shouldn't everyone else be able to use it and not reinvent the wheel? A one-stop, common repository for all tools, integrations, workloads, processes, and scripts discourages duplicate tools from being used, and enables vetted automation processes to be shared across teams. This eliminates incentives to create shadow IT and saves a tremendous amount of time, money and resources.

Make cost optimization a whole-team approach. Most people just do their jobs with the tools they have and don't think about the bills to the organization. This results in many wasteful daily choices that add up over time. But what if every employee could be automatically notified when they accidentally waste resources? Enterprises need a cross-organizational system that automatically alerts employees to wasteful activity. For example, dev environments might be left on when they're not being used anymore; zombie VMs could be running in the background; cloud resources could be provisioned for certain tasks when less expensive options would work just as effectively. If stakeholders were automatically notified of such things and provided more cost-effective options, the aggregate savings from optimal daily decisions would be significant.

Multi-cloud helps enable the innovation you need to stay competitive. But you don't need to throw millions of dollars down the drain to stay innovative. With a holistic approach to cloud management based on full visibility, interoperability, shareability and responsibility, enterprises can reap the innovation benefits of multi-cloud without breaking the bank.

The cost of innovation is steep enough - using an overarching framework of the right capabilities you can vastly reduce the cost of inefficiency and accelerate all of your major cloud objectives.

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