Page 12 - CARAHSOFT, June/July 2021

The Path to Future-Ready Government IT
The importance of a multi-cloud
strategy
Ranil Dassanayaka
Vice President of Architecture and Engineering, Government, Education and Healthcare Sector, VMware
Those tools also give agencies the visibility they need to monitor cloud environments so they can quickly identify and remediate any security issues.
Cloud has democratized access to infrastructure and tools for developers, and although this approach is liberating and empowering for those employees,
it can create challenges from a security and compliance perspective. Therefore, agencies should ensure that developers have ready access to security-compliant infrastructure and app catalogs so that they can build and deploy applications quickly in response to the needs of customers and employees without compromising security.
Gaining visibility and control over all cloud environments is essential for secure, modern IT operations
AS CLOUD ADOPTION SPREADS across government, agencies often end up with a complex mix of environments and services. To control costs, improve operational efficiency and make the most of the technology, agencies should take a more holistic approach to managing clouds.
Thinking holistically prompts agencies to proactively consider and plan for multiple clouds while reducing the risk and cost of managing, securing and governing them — rather than only developing skills and processes for a single cloud provider. Management tools and practices formed from a multi-cloud perspective allow agencies to focus on the entire life cycle of cloud operations. As a result, they
can efficiently and effectively set up, deploy, manage and optimally run infrastructure resources and application services anywhere.
In addition, a holistic approach enables agencies to make best- of-breed choices that match
the needs of specific agency
and mission applications and enables visibility across all cloud environments. Agencies can ensure that resource utilization is optimized, and they can minimize waste while accelerating service delivery and performance.
How multi-cloud management improves security
With a well-thought-out multi-
cloud strategy, agencies should have the flexibility to pick the right cloud service with the right security and compliance level (such as FedRAMP or the Defense Department’s Impact Levels) with the right economics to best support the applications and workloads.
This flexibility allows for the proper matching of the cloud environment to the degree of security that agencies need for a particular activity.
Management tools designed for multi-cloud environments give IT teams the ability to consistently deploy secure configurations and policies across a variety of applications and clouds using a single set of tools.
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