By Ronan David, VP of Strategy for EfficientIP

It’s feeling cloudy these days, but it’s not the weather. It’s cloud technology. According to Gartner, cloud computing will rise 21 percent from last year ($186b market). The proliferation means that businesses are now using multi-cloud solutions too. But while vendors are determined to lock companies into their services, enterprises want to mitigate the risks and volatility of dependence on any single provider.

The path to cloud independence starts with an easy cloud transition. Too often, organizations forget to prepare for seamless multi-cloud capabilities at the start of their journey and become trapped by proprietary technology. According to IDC research, only a few enterprises were confident that their multi-cloud strategy. Choosing the right DDI solution (IPAM, DNS and DHCP) is closely linked to making the transition easier.

Poor IP synchronization or lack of integration with an existing IT automation ecosystem are the type of conflicts that occur when teams have multiple solutions in place. Add in a lack of communication and deployment and migration issues happen. To avoid this, businesses need to consider three things:

  • Cloud-agnostic orchestration is critical for success. As multi-cloud or hybrid cloud use grows, cloud orchestration becomes critical for success. IT teams need a unified view so they can manage IP resources efficiently, to avoid connectivity issues between the various applications hosted across all providers/partners. A centralized and cloud-agnostic IP address management process, can deliver a single repository, as well as global management of the IP address system to make multi-cloud  effective, secure and well-managed.
  • Mitigating cloud security risks. If IP addresses are not assigned and managed efficiently, latency bandwidth and general application performance are negatively affected and security becomes an issue. DNS controls incoming and outgoing traffic to the cloud- so if compromised access gets cut off.  Many businesses believe that default DNS protection by the cloud provider is enough, but these solutions don’t consider the overall traffic. A purpose-built DNS security solution, offering intelligence on the context of transactions, is therefore critical.
  • Moving to DevOps and the cloud. In DevOps environments, new applications and services must be rolled out quickly to improve user experiences. However, there is often limited visibility into virtual networks or IP addresses. Integrating DDI into the orchestration process brings consistent, error-free configurations and improves speed of provisioning of IP resources which can improve time to market.

As more organizations rely on the cloud, potential risks grow. Deploying DDI that can automate tasks using agnostic solutions is a strategic consideration for managing multi-cloud infrastructures, maintaining compliance and protecting sensitive data. It’s a major step towards ensuring the business remains truly cloud independent.

 

 

By Ronan David, VP of Strategy for EfficientIP