Maximizing the Business Benefits of Multi-Cloud Adoption

Cloud services can present a huge advantage for organizations pursuing digital and network transformations. Leaders see the cloud as a path to modernize their IT infrastructure, so they can achieve greater flexibility and agility, lower costs of operations, faster time to market, and heightened competitive advantage — just to name a few.

However, for each of these major benefits, there’s also an inherent set of obstacles. Let’s break down the benefits and the associated roadblocks that can derail your success:

1. Greater flexibility. Cloud services can be accessed from pretty much anywhere there’s connectivity. However, this user flexibility adds proliferating complexity for the network operations (NetOps) teams responsible for tracking and managing user experiences. Quite simply, instead of managing a single network for an employee base of 10,000, they’re now effectively managing 10,000 networks.

2. More agility. Cloud services undoubtedly offer flexibility in deployment. However, these diverse services can vary substantially among cloud providers and they can be time consuming and expensive to manage.

3. Lower costs of operations. While cloud providers can offer economies of scale, those advantages can quickly be eradicated if businesses incur costly outages and performance issues, and NetOps teams are saddled with lengthy troubleshooting efforts. 

4. Faster time to market. Cloudservices can provide businesses with a faster way to monetize new market offerings. However, without an effective way to ensure optimized availability and service levels, launching these new offerings can simply be too risky. 

5. Competitive advantage. All of the above advantages can translate to a competitive advantage — as long as there aren’t any failures. While cloud service providers may promise continuous, 24×7 availability, that’s not the reality. If you doubt that’s the case, I’d just point you to this article: The 15 Biggest Cloud Outages Of 2022.

Luckily, analysts predict that over the next five years, service providers will offer cloud-native solutions that address many key management and monitoring challenges. The question then becomes, do you wait five years for these advancements, or do you look for a solution today? The reality is that some software vendors have cracked the code in removing the blind spots associated with running services in the cloud. 

Here are the top five capabilities to look for:

1. High-scale, active testing that delivers end-to-end visibility, including beyond the edge of your enterprise network. 
2. Visibility into the impact of issues on users and application performance, enabling more intelligent prioritization and faster response.
3. Synthetic transaction monitoring that delivers increased visibility into application performance, and how it affects the overall user experience.
4. Trusted root cause analysis that enables your teams to identify the source of an issue, even if the problem arises in cloud, SaaS, or ISP networks. 
5. Actionable insights into cloud network performance metrics like voice/data loss, packet loss, latency, capacity, and more. 

With these insights, your NetOps team can quickly and confidently determine where the issue resides, and whether it’s the responsibility of the internal team, the cloud provider, or other service provider. 

Digital transformation success depends on modern architectures like cloud, SaaS, SD-WAN, and more. However, unless you have full visibility into the performance of these transformational technologies, your user experiences will suffer. In the process, your brand will take a hit and your competitive advantage won’t be an advantage for long.

Learn more here.