Over the past two and a half years, the cloud has proven its value as a catalyst for business and digital transformation. Today, companies are leveraging the cloud to innovate, accelerating time to market, achieving unprecedented efficiencies, and simplifying IT environments. Yet most corporate cloud estates have evolved ad hoc in response to different business needs, with most companies running hybrid and multi-cloud strategies.

According to 451 Research, more than half of enterprises are pursuing an integrated hybrid IT strategy. What’s more, more than 70% of enterprises deploy a public cloud strategy that involves more than one provider. The advantages of a multi-cloud strategy—giving businesses flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in is hard to ignore. Yet leveraging multi-cloud and hybrid clouds introduces complexity to managing the IT estate.

Companies are looking to cross-cloud strategies as a smarter approach to managing these environments. The goal of a cross-cloud strategy is to unify multiple clouds under a single banner and look at application modernisation, management, infrastructure, and cloud security and networking holistically and manage them more consistently. In addition, it will enable an organisation to move easily between multiple public clouds.

Some of the core components of a cutting edge cross-cloud strategy include:

Solutions that enable cloud architects to manage all private and public cloud services from a single pane of glass. A cloud-agnostic data management platform should make it easy for the company to share, replicate, and move data across different clouds and regions. The tools are still relatively new but are evolving fast.

Cloud security and networking that spans all clouds. This may prompt investment into holistic identity and access management.

Smarter cross-cloud governance. This may include the ability to set policies for how applications, resources, services, and data for all clouds in a more unified manner.

Cutting edge FinOps tools and practices. FinOps tools and practices bring financial accountability to the variable spending model of cloud-based IT—in turn enabling companies to simplify operations and make smarter decisions about cloud spending. A cutting-edge cloud expense management solution enables FinOps within an enterprise, giving it visibility across its multi-cloud estate so that it can accurately track and forecast cloud spending.

With a cross-cloud strategy in place, the company’s developers can write code using their preferred frameworks with less concern about where it will be deployed. It also becomes simpler to migrate or deploy each app to the cloud that is the most appropriate fit. Security becomes tighter and more seamless. And the company has a better view of not only what each cloud is costing and its performance, but also a holistic view of its entire cloud estate.

Get in touch for a demonstration of our FinOps practices and tools to learn how we can help you accelerate your digital transformation and simplify cloud management.