By now, you’ve done all the hard work of assessing your IT environment, considering your application workloads, and have mapped out a thoughtful strategy to help you be successful. Now, it’s time to put that multi-cloud plan into motion and realize those goals.
This phase should be iterative, never stopping after implementation. Priorities during this phase can include reducing time to value to achieve the goals you laid out in your plan, reducing risk, and managing costs more effectively. And while it’s been said time and again, it bears repeating: navigating multi-cloud is not a matter of technology by itself. Successful transition encompasses people, processes, and technology. Agencies will have to prepare for a cultural shift, process changes, and be equipped with the necessary technologies to enable successful multi-cloud deployment.
Here are three things to keep in mind to help you execute your multi-cloud plan:
1. Manage Your Instances
To effectively manage costs, you’ll want to put in place automation for continuous monitoring with a focus on your instances. Too often, organizations have been surprised by shadow IT where employees knowingly or unknowingly use cloud services that contribute to exhausting the cloud budget. Actively managing your instances and services in your multi-cloud environment is vital to monitoring cost efficiencies.
Additionally, it’s important to keep in mind that not all instances are created equal. Certain instances in the cloud run better than other workloads. That’s why it’s critical to continuously check in and understand which workloads perform best for large transaction databases and which perform best for large capacity but small transactions. Focusing on managing your instances will help IT staff continually optimize your multi-cloud environment once deployed.
2. Re-Evaluate Services
Remember, once you’ve deployed your multi-cloud plan, it’s never meant to be set and forgotten. CSPs are constantly adding to their catalogs of available services. Take the time to evaluate and determine if you need all those services instead of performing them in house. Which option is more effective? Which is more reliable? Be sure to continuously check in.
3. Leverage a Trusted Partner
Through Iron Bow’s strategic partnerships, consulting services, and turnkey solutions, we’re able to help government agencies at every stage of their multi-cloud journeys. At Iron Bow, we can help power your multi-cloud strategy with solutions that offer a faster route to cloud infrastructures, while also providing a single point of management for your various platforms.
Migrations are especially challenging when you’re facing end-of-life hardware, expiring leases, and legacy applications that can’t be moved to a cloud-native platform. Iron Bow’s services and solutions can help you address this challenge by offering a single point of governance, management, and security across platforms as well as the interoperability necessary to reduce risk in migration.
Now, you have a say where legacy applications will reside and don’t have to do costly or time-consuming application refactoring first.
Above all, we aim to empower your agency by providing time for refactoring while enabling you to fully take advantage of consumption-based cloud infrastructure. Iron Bow has a true multi-cloud strategy with regards to transfer and integration. We have fully embraced the “any cloud, from anywhere, on any device” multi-cloud strategy. With our reach of strategic partnerships, we leverage architecture that allows customers the choice of where a workload should exist and the ability to migrate it there without the need to convert or refactor it first. That’s why we look to eliminate lock-in wherever possible.
The Future of Multi-Cloud in Government
It’s safe to say that multi-cloud will be here to stay in government and organizations across all sectors far beyond the year 2021, “the year of the multi-cloud.” However, for Federal IT teams to reap all the benefits that multi-cloud has to offer, including agility, flexibility, predictive performance, security and compliance, and efficiency, you must start with a robust multi-cloud plan.
This blog is an excerpt from our new playbook “3 Key Phases to Help Government Agencies Successfully Navigate Multi-Cloud” by experts from Iron Bow Technologies, Dell, and Intel. To download the full playbook, head here.
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