By Sylvain Siou, VP, Systems Engineering, EfficientIP
Covid-19 has been a rapid learning curve for businesses as they transition to virtual off-premise spaces, requiring fast and efficient access to varied applications to ensure a return to business-as-usual. Meanwhile, appetite for solutions which improve efficiency has risen significantly to meet increasing demand, requiring companies to host several cloud technologies at once.
Southeast Asia is also going through digitalization among government agencies and business with deployment of cloud and multicloud services in response to evolving business needs. According to Gartner, Southeast Asia’s cloud market will continue to grow and potentially reach USD 40.32 billion by 2025. In this time, ASEAN has been working on expansion of universal broadband infrastructure, building a stronger ICT industry, promoting ICT across sectors, developing a skilled workforce and creating a solid infrastructure suited to technology development.
The value of multicloud
Whereas a single cloud provider can provide specific use for a company such as email or videoconferencing, multicloud allows businesses to pick and choose the services required to optimize their workplace, ensuring that all the diverse needs of that business are met via a flexible infrastructure. Cloud applications or storage solutions are now part of the toolkit of a modern business. IBM finds that by 2023, organizations globally are expected to be using at least 10 clouds, from a growing number of vendors. However, to date, only 25 percent have multicloud management strategies in place.
Successful deployment
Multicloud success hinges on the security, performance and understanding of cloud infrastructures. With ASEAN moving forward with cloud and multicloud adoption, data security is among the top concerns for the region. The ASEAN Framework on Personal Data Protection was launched to monitor and protect data for users in the region, as a set of principles to guide the implementation of measures at national and regional levels to promote and strengthen personal data protection for the region.
According to a recent IDC survey, over half (55 percent) found a lack of unified management and monitoring, and an inability to drive a single security policy across different cloud providers, to be the key issues when implementing multicloud, rising to three fifths (58 percent) when building a common workflow. This has been a pain point for cloud service providers in Thailand on top of existing national policies that go against cloud practices.
As companies continue to deal with the pandemic and a distributed workforce, ad hoc multicloud adoption puts pressure on IT infrastructures due to fragmented data management, challenges around end-to-end security, and full network visibility. Multicloud increases complexity of management network infrastructures, due to the inherent complexity of providing available, reliable, and secure connectivity to applications distributed across on-premises data centers and private clouds as well as across multiple public clouds.
What measures can be taken to mitigate these risks and reap the most benefits from multicloud?
DDI technology provides the required solutions to meet these complexity and security risks head on, especially as it provides a unified framework for DNS-DHCP-IPAM and network configurations. It offers services on top of public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructures to provide scalability, security, and availability of applications and services. IP address management, based on a unified source of data based on IP, is indeed fundamental to keep applications working, as well as ensuring processes are not prone to errors and time-consuming. The IP address management must therefore happen at the foundational level of the application orchestration workflow.
Centralized management allows workplaces to overcome network complexity with control and consistency across the various cloud infrastructures. Single viewpoint control and enhanced visibility in DDI solutions help businesses understand and control their networks; and stay abreast in the face of new digital infrastructure, saving time and money.
End-to-end automation, which DDI technology provides through a centralized IP data repository and valuable metadata, is key for a successful shift to cloud. It also results in significant time savings.
DDI technologies also ensure that multicloud can be deployed rapidly, allowing companies to roll out new scalable services more efficiently. Faster time-to-market is key to the success of a business, from startups to well-established companies. With time savings on IT infrastructure management and deployment, teams spend more time on product development, serving their customers in the best way.
Risks to multicloud security can be resolved with a unified DDI solution as they ensure company security policies are enforced across the entire infrastructure. Some advanced DDI solutions are also capable of enhancing protection against data theft, by analysing DNS traffic and user behaviour to detect exfiltration attempts via the DNS.
As reliance on multicloud increases, it is critical that architecture is simple, secure, and scalable to add real value to cater to an increasingly distributed workforce. Overlooking this can have catastrophic consequences, such as application downtime. With DDI, businesses are poised to benefit from the new era of collaborative technology, especially with multicloud as a successful and crucial part of their lives as everyone returns to work.
