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Chapter 7

Trend 7 : A fragmented internal Cloud landscape

With the increasing use of Cloud you actually see a similar trend as with the early days of the internet. Many organizations start with Cloud, but there is not always a clear strategy or roadmap for using it. What is the consequence of this?

Highlights

  1. Without control over the Cloud use of different departments, a fragmented landscape with different Cloud providers and own data centers arises;
  2. A solution is a central management of the locations of the workloads

A fragmented landscape with different Cloud providers

It often starts with a department within an organization that starts using a part of a public Cloud provider. At a certain point, the IT department feels pressured to accept this, but that doesn’t help with the internal use of Cloud within the organization. Other departments see this, want to start using Cloud as well, but are searching and finding their own way in this. This creates a fragmented approach to the use of Cloud within an organization: no central insights and therefore it is for example difficult to manage costs of the Cloud. The result is a fragmented landscape with different Cloud providers and own data centers. What can you do about this?

Centrally manage multiple locations of workloads

As an organization you want to keep control over the internal Cloud use of different departments. With all the possibilities that are available today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to check this. What you often see these days is that many departments outside IT buy their own software, which makes controlling very difficult. 

More and more solutions will be offered to dissolve a fragmented landscape. Not to include all workloads in 1 specific Cloud, but precisely to ensure that different locations where you can deploy the workloads are centrally managed. You can also ensure that the location of the workload also becomes a factor in the choice of deployment location. 

It is important for an organization and also for IT departments to facilitate this. As an organization, you can choose to set up a portal, for example, where different Cloud providers come together. The IT department of an organization then adapts these to the wishes and needs of different departments and ensures that control is centrally managed.

People, Processes and Technology

Invest in centralized control planes

Most likely, certain departments within your organization are already using the Cloud. It therefore never happens that you can start completely in a green field and have to reinvent the wheel yourself. It is therefore increasingly important to invest in standardized control planes that ensure that the management of different environments can be done from the same place.

This can be your own data center or, for example, via platforms such as Microsoft Azure. On top of that, you can use Azure Arc to centrally manage it and get a grip on the various Cloud environments. It suddenly gives you the option of choosing where to run which workload. This can be interesting from a cost perspective, or because of data privacy requirements.

A controlled solution

With central management you go in large steps from a difficult-tomanage environment to a manageable solution. This also offers the possibility to set up the governance of the Cloud. This is something that often gets little or no attention in the beginning. Around the time it is really necessary, the complexity must be so high that the governance is difficult to implement. These techniques give the opportunity to take a step back and to look at the entire landscape from a distance and to make choices about deployment.

Conclusion

It is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to control Cloud usage across departments and resolve a fragmented landscape. A fragmented approach to different Cloud usage can break up an organization. One of the solutions is to ensure that you can centrally manage the various locations of where you deploy the workloads and facilitate this in departments. The facilitating role stands or falls on user-friendliness, which is quite new for some IT departments.