How to Manage the Cost, Performance and Security of Multi-Clouds

Do you have a clear view of what’s going on in your company’s cloud services?

If your business is like most out there today, it’s consuming some form of cloud services. Cloud services are typically applications running on virtual shared computing resources. Organizations make use of one or a combination of public, private, hybrid or multi-clouds in a manner that meets their business requirements, organization size and security considerations. Since there are countless cloud-based solutions to choose from – and they’re all designed to do different things – many businesses are now using more than one cloud product or service.

In fact, 87 percent of organizations use multiple cloud services, according to an F5 Networks survey of 3,460 IT professionals released in January 2018. More than half (59 per cent) say they use between two and six clouds to run their business.

Multi-Cloud Challenges

With multiple clouds, however, come multiple challenges. Some of the top multi-cloud concerns expressed by the F5 survey respondents were:

Applying consistent security across all company applications (42%)

Protecting applications from new and emerging threats (40%)

Optimizing application performance (34%)

Gaining visibility into application health (31%)

Another big worry in a multi-cloud environment? Cost.

When RightScale polled 997 IT pros for its 2018 State of the Cloud Study, it found that 81 per cent are in a multi-cloud environment; the number one priority among all of those surveyed was optimizing cloud costs.

Although survey respondents estimated that 30 per cent of their total cloud spending goes to waste, RightScale discovered the real rate is actually higher, at 35 per cent.

In short, if you’re using various cloud services, they each have different types of features, security, data analytics, performance monitoring, updates and costs. If you lack insight into how well they work – and how well they work together – these disparate cloud systems could cost you time, money … and customers.

Banking on Splunk Multi-Cloud

Even multi-billion-dollar companies face multi-cloud challenges. With 24 million customers, 96,000 employees and operations in 50 countries, Scotiabank is the third largest bank in Canada. To gain better insight and control of its multi-cloud situation, Scotiabank partnered with Solsys Corp. for a multi-cloud solution from Splunk.

Splunk allows Scotiabank to monitor its clouds on several fronts, including application performance, uptime, service issues, usage and capacity metrics. Automated alerts help the bank identify potential problems almost immediately so they can be addressed quickly.

By using Splunk to track how bank customers use cloud-based services, Scotiabank can adjust its cloud resources to meet demand (and improve those client-facing services) accordingly. Scotiabank can monitor cloud spending by region and business unit to optimize its cloud budgets and predict future cloud costs for business planning.

Making Multi-Cloud Secure

“Security is crucial for any financial institution. Splunk bolsters Scotibank’s multi-cloud environment with encryption, secure data storage and intelligent analytics,” says Ryoji Betchaku, Engineering Manager, Data Intelligence practice at Solsys.

Since much of the Splunk solution is automated using continuous integration and continuous delivery best practices, deploying across multiple clouds is fast, consistent and cost efficient.

“We can deploy an entire Splunk Cluster to multiple regions in just 45 minutes. And it doesn’t have to be me – anyone who has access to our Splunk module can do the same thing,” says David Getson, director of cloud operations for Scotiabank.

It’s a deployment model that works for organizations of any size, from multi-billion dollar corporations to SMBs.

After 186 years in business, Scotiabank has trusted Solsys and Splunk to gain a clear view of its multi-cloud management, monitoring, security and costs.