Which methods and frameworks exist to address the challenges of Multi-Cloud Sourcing

What can be done, then, to successfully address the huge challenge of multi-cloud management and instate a short-term, mid-term, and long-term roadmap that will be accepted by a management board?

We advise and accompany many large enterprises in the area of cloud compliance: insurance companies, banks, transport businesses, the City of Vienna as a whole, hospitals. And we see the same initial situation everywhere: There is not enough know-how. Problems are approached from a short-term perspective and not viewed in a sufficiently holistic fashion, and there is a lack of resources (personnel and financial means) to achieve the transformation from a classic internal IT organisation to an IT broker.

First off, all possible and relevant cloud management activities for a company must be collected in a library and described. For each activity, a decision needs to be made whether sufficient resources are available – and if not, whether to acquire them or outsource the activity.

Secondly, every new use case must be assigned to a cloud service. This is called the Shared Responsibility Matrix, and its purpose is to determine which cloud management activities are important in which scope – for each such activity requires considerable effort, and as stated above, resources are generally scarce.

In a third step, businesses need to ensure that the selection, establishment, and assignment of cloud management activities does not occur randomly and in a different manner each time but instead is strategically controlled and performed with sensible prioritisation. This can be done by using a cloud management heatmap.

Summary

In order to handle the complexity of proper cloud management and good cloud governance, businesses must (1) establish their own cloud management library, then (2) decide on the best possible Shared Responsibility Matrix for each individual combination of use case and service, and finally (3) create a roadmap in order to fill in the gaps and establish know-how and competencies that are strategically relevant for its organisation.

Please contact us if you would like to learn more about the Multi-Cloud-Sourcing-Frameworks.