As a standard operation model, multi-cloud is widely adopted by organizations in various industries. According to HashiCorp’s 2021 State of Cloud Strategy Survey, 76% of respondents stated that their organization had already used a multi-cloud strategy, while 53% believed that business goals could be achieved with the help of a multi-cloud strategy, as large enterprises in particular acknowledged the value of multi-cloud.
Multi-cloud obviously has several advantages which organizations can utilize to attain their operational goals. Business, for instance, can make use of the capabilities of cloud providers in handling risks such as security vulnerabilities or system hacking. It also provides a unique perk for businesses when entering a new market. “Adopting multi-cloud also provides a direct approach to organizations so that they can comply quickly with security regulations of high demanding markets. The regulation of privacy, for example,” - Mr. Hieu said.
Mentioning the use cases of reputable cloud providers, Mr. Duong considered high availability as one of the most advantageous benefits. In fact, there are no providers committing 100-percent availability without any incidents like the outage of the availability zone. Therefore, using more than one cloud provider helps organizations to maintain their operation in case of unexpected issues.
However, using multi-cloud providers poses a challenge also. For the safe use of multi-cloud, cloud engineers have to tackle security challenges regarding compliance with general privacy policy and standard, sharing responsibility between cloud providers and customers. They also met with the lack of capable IT experts working for the business, as well as lack of domain knowledge and of particular business operations.
Another challenge is to develop security automation in the environment of various providers. According to Mr. Lap, multi-cloud requires high automation that forces cloud engineers to explore solutions combining useful native services and creating smooth security operation on multi-cloud.
In multi-cloud architecture design, it is also about how to consolidate security-related best practices of cloud providers. “We have an approach: specializing the involvement of different parties for different purposes, case by case. Identity management; for example, would be certainly assigned to Azure Active Directory while single sign-on (SSO) of AWS is applied as an additional service” - Mr. Hieu shared one case of FPT Software’s team. Nevertheless, services of Azure may not be compatible with AWS, which requires a third-party to harmonize and solve the problems between services of providers.
To conclude, an optimal approach has to be proven through positive results, so all three experts advised on a strategy, accompanied by various tests which clearly identifies the responsibility of involved parties. It is also crucial that cloud engineers and IT engineers develop a security automation process and beware of threat detection to maintain safety in the hybrid and multi-cloud environment.
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