An effective multi-cloud strategy can ease an organization’s digital transformation journey. Successful and progressive organizations create a command center that thinks like a business to orchestrate their multi-cloud journey.

Multi-cloud, which includes private, public, and hybrid clouds, provides enterprises an opportunity to configure and leverage best-of-breed technology platforms and is the new path to performance. These platforms can be combined uniquely to accurately address workloads, business objectives, and end-user preferences, resulting in agility and exceptional business benefits. 

The upside is significant, but it comes with a price: organizations are aware that moving their legacy IT into the cloud can be an uphill task, mainly because of the high financial costs and the potential data security risks. Enterprises need new management techniques and capabilities to optimize performance, cost, and security . It is critical that businesses orchestrate an effective multi-cloud operations journey to manage the complete life cycle through the lens of business outcomes. 

A traditional operation center focusing on architecture, configuration, resource and capacity management, security, and compliance is essential. In addition, enterprises need a command center that thinks like a business. Most business leaders see the value in adding a platform with business outcome governance at the core because it enhances IT; CIOs and CTOs find considerable value in it as it propels IT beyond the typical supply chain role it has come to embody.  

The new approach to multi-cloud cannot be ignored, especially as the business stakes are extremely high. Every IT decision must be well-considered, and every selection must be aligned with desired business outcomes. 

A robust cloud strategy is driven by the imperative to orchestrate customer journeys in a multi-cloud operation model with a laser focus on business. The prerequisite of such a vision is a plug-and-play platform that enables smooth and flawless multi-cloud adoption and manages it through its entire lifecycle. It brings Cloud, SaaS, and Disaster Recovery services providers closer to the needs of IT consumers such as developers, enterprise users, and business users.

Designing effective customer journeys in a multi-cloud ops model via a single plug-and-play platform

An integrated plug-and-play platform for multi-cloud adoption should be thought of as an ‘Enterprise Business Operations Center’ (EBOC)—as shown in Figure 1—that closes the gap between IT and business using several building blocks such as business-user enablement, customer-journey management, new services launch, service onboarding, business services blueprints hub, automated operations, technology and business operations, DevSecOps enablement, and governance. An EBOC has the capability to tie these building blocks with multi-cloud ecosystem of providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud). The providers bring their self-service catalogs, provisioning automation, observability, AIOps, FinOps, and Optimization processes to the table. With this, the operations center connects all the dots that enterprises need for multi-cloud success. 

However, a host of technical capabilities and expertise are required to power the success of the operations center. The capabilities and expertise span service enablement,  industry-specific blueprints and solutions, platforms for transformation, scale, and innovation, the ability to drive analytics through AI and ML, cloud-native integrations, critical ecosystem services, and cost management. 

Collectively, the building blocks, cloud providers, and technical capabilities bring a large ecosystem into play. Experienced enterprises know that friction between too many moving parts in such an ecosystem can quickly erode ROI from their multi-cloud investments. Enterprises need to manage this ecosystem by leveraging management frameworks that drive cloud-oriented business transformation and combine it with tools and processes that turn the ecosystem into a seamless, single platform. 

A business service marketplace—the first plane of the management framework help managers with proactive enablement of technology option and supervision. The second plane, with business analytics, visualization, and data, is designed for various user personas. The third is a control plane with cognitive engines, policies, an API marketplace, FinOps, DevSecOps, and Operations. The depth of expertise behind these three planes determine business objectives and outcomes (see Figure 2) – such as the ability to map user journeys, manage agile processes, security, compliance, and integration of OKR, MVP, MCD, DevOps, SRE and API, etc.

The framework must be designed to manage the multi-cloud life cycle using industry-specific best practices and business goals to drive decisions. The technology behind the framework can use AI- and ML-based engines that enable observability and optimization of business processes. These technologies, combined with data and analytics, also provide the means to manage performance, cost, risk, and efficiency. 

Multi-cloud approaches are quickly replacing other strategies to achieve varied business goals. The shift allows enterprises to deploy advanced technologies at velocity without lock-ins that can impede flexibility, risk, compliance, and growth. 

Wipro FullStride Cloud Services’ Boundaryless Enterprise presents a holistic way to manage multi-cloud complexity. It brings together the entire portfolio of Wipro’s cloud-related capabilities, offerings, and talent to help clients align business and IT with the cloud imperative more effectively, create significant business value, and increase competitive differentiation.