The adoption of cloud computing has accelerated rapidly over the past decade. More and more companies are utilizing multiple cloud platforms from different providers, leading to multi-cloud environments. Developing an effective multi-cloud strategy is crucial yet complex. A critical first step is conducting a thorough cloud assessment to inform decision-making.
What is Cloud Assessment
A cloud assessment is an evaluation of an organization’s current IT infrastructure, applications, processes and policies to determine readiness for cloud adoption. It identifies strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to cloud migration or expansion.
The assessment examines:
- Existing infrastructure, data centers and systems
- Application architectures, dependencies and readiness
- Network connectivity and bandwidth needs
- Data security, regulatory compliance and governance
- Cloud knowledge, staff skills and organizational culture
This analysis by cloud assessment services provides evidence-based insights into transition complexity, costs, risks and timelines. It enables organizations to shape robust cloud strategies aligned to business goals.
Importance of Assessment for Multi-Cloud
Multi-cloud refers to utilizing two or more public cloud computing platforms, often from different vendors like AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. Distributing environments across multiple clouds provides advantages like flexibility, resilience, cost savings and access to specialized services.
However, multi-cloud brings greater complexity to integration, security, governance, and skill requirements. The ecosystem involves more components, interdependencies, ownership and regulations.
Thorough assessment is crucial for multi-cloud success by revealing:
- Workload Profiles: Suitability of existing IT portfolio for migration across on-prem, single-cloud, multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud architectures
- Migration Roadmaps: Phase-wise transition plans reflecting workload priorities, change impact, resource needs and timelines
- Optimal Platform Selection: Which combination of cloud platforms best addresses functional and non-functional aspects of workloads
- Application and Data Portability: Ease of moving applications or data across cloud providers in the future
- Security and Governance: Unified controls and policies needed to secure the expanded attack surface
- Cost Models: Total cost of ownership across full multi-cloud lifecycle, and cost optimization opportunities
- Organization and Talent: Skill gaps, staffing needs, training plans and organizational structure for sustainable operations
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Core Areas of Assessment
Conducting a comprehensive assessment covering technology, processes, organization and costs is vital for multi-cloud planning. It enables deeply analyzing the critical dimensions that will impact multi-cloud strategy decisions and outcomes. The core areas that organizations should focus assessment efforts on include infrastructure, cloud alignment, organizational readiness, security/compliance, and financials.
Infrastructure Assessment
A detailed infrastructure assessment provides insights into the starting state of the existing IT portfolio. This involves gathering inventory on all data centers, hardware assets, network connections, application architectures, resource consumption patterns and interdependencies. By collating utilization metrics across servers, storage, network, databases and other infrastructure elements, organizations can map workload profiles and transition complexity.
Assessing current capacity, virtualization levels, fault tolerance mechanisms and performance benchmarks enables modeling of target cloud architectures. Discovery of hardware lifecycles, contractual constraints and disaster recovery posture informs strategic plans.
Holistic infrastructure analysis empowers fact-based workload migration prioritization, timelines, risk management and resource allocation. Rather than simple hardware inventories, assessments must capture layered logical and physical topology maps, telemetry data and infrastructure integration touchpoints that impact cloud migrations.
Cloud Alignment Assessment
The business context drives cloud strategies, making alignment assessments crucial. This evaluates the impetus for cloud adoption by capturing business goals, success metrics and views across executive leadership. Assessing proposed value propositions for agility, innovation, scale and other business outcomes provides grounding. Technologists can map workload profiles against various migration approaches – rehosting, replatforming, refactoring and rebuilding on the cloud. Comparing application architectures, codebases, resource demands, security needs and integration complexity with cloud capabilities gives readiness insights.
Data classification, sovereignty, residency and compliance requirements must be evaluated against cloud provider offerings. Such business and technology analyses help identify transition risks, shape milestones and secure stakeholder buy-in. They enable anchoring cloud roadmaps onto strategic goals versus tactical cost savings. Alignment assessments also feed into the building of robust business cases and cloud total cost of ownership models.
Organizational Assessment
Migrating to the cloud requires organizational readiness to adopt new architectures, processes, tools and culture. Assessment of the current state of teams, skill sets, staff experience and governance bandwidth reveals gaps to be addressed. Structured interviews, surveys and focus group discussions uncover the distribution of cloud skills across roles to shape training plans. Testing knowledge on architectures, security, availability, scalability and cloud-native concepts highlights learning needs.
Assessing appetite for change management and cultural alignment to cloud tenets like automation helps to minimize resistance. Analyzing past successes, failures and lessons learned from IT transformation initiatives builds readiness. Quantifying organizational preparedness for expanded governance complexity aids multi-cloud planning. Such organizational assessments enable targeting competency development, staffing strategies and change management focus areas.
Security and Compliance Assessment
Enterprises adopting multi-cloud face expanded attack surfaces and compliance exposures. Assessing existing on-premises security controls, policies, technologies and vulnerabilities establishes a baseline. Security assessments must gauge cyber risks from increased cloud accounts, credentials, network connections and data access.
Evaluating legacy controls like firewalls, VPNs, encryption, key management and endpoint security reveals gaps in light of cloud shared responsibility models. Compliance assessments should map statutory and regulatory demands for data sovereignty, residency and handling with cloud provider provisions. Identifying all data protection and privacy regulations impacting the organization and its customers is key, especially for global institutions.
Such diligent security and compliance stocktakes enable crafting unified control and audit frameworks spanning multiple cloud environments. They guide cloud security architecture decisions, additional safeguards and provider selection based on risk appetite.
Financial Assessment
Cloud migration business cases rely on financial analyses revealing cost perspectives. Assessing current IT spending – across resources, platforms, applications, and business units – provides the total cost of ownership visibility. Comparing on-premises infrastructure, licensing, upgrade, and operational costs with equivalent cloud expenditures highlights savings.
Modeling the target deployment sizes, utilization variability, network and storage needs projects monthly cloud costs. Factoring one-time migration, integration, and organizational change costs gauges payback timelines and ROI. Such cost modeling and comparison enables fine-tuning cloud strategies to optimize life cycle spending. Assessing FinOps practices around usage metering, tagging, allocation and budget governance sets the stage for managing variable cloud expenses.
The insights allow for the balancing of performance with cost across multiple cloud platforms, guiding decisions on workload placement and account structures. They also enable the building of guardrails into spending based on business priorities rather than arbitrary limits. The clarity drives financially prudent multi-cloud adoption aligned to value.
Conducting Effective Cloud Assessments
Crafting an optimal multi-cloud environment requires evidence-based analysis of tradeoffs across dimensions like technical compatibility, security, economics and operational complexity. Organizations should follow structured assessment approaches encompassing tools, processes and expertise:
Automated Assessments
Using cloud assessment software that programmatically collects infrastructure, application data and utilization metrics. This provides rapid, broad coverage to size cloud migrations.
Questionnaires and Interviews
Capturing perspectives from key staff through surveys and discussions to gauge skills, culture, governance needs etc.
Discovery Workshops
Conducting architecture design and planning sessions focused on specific workloads or technology domains.
Proof of Concept Testing
Implementing trial migrations of representative workloads to validate costs, performance and integration.
External Expert Analysis
Leveraging cloud architects and migration specialists to assess complex initiatives and reinforce internal capacity.
Assessments should include executive sponsorship, staff collaboration, defined success criteria, and an integrated analysis framework. Ongoing assessments are also needed to keep multi-cloud governance aligned with business priorities as the landscape evolves.
Building a Multi-Cloud Strategy
Detailed cloud assessments provide fact-based evidence for designing balanced multi-cloud environments tailored to an organization’s needs. Core focus areas driving strategy development include:
Primary and Secondary Platform Selection
Assessments reveal technical, economic and vendor suitability for distributing workloads across target cloud platforms, avoiding vendor lock-in.
Migration and Integration Planning
Grouping interdependent systems into transition waves aligned with the cloud-native redesign, staff bandwidth and cost targets.
Identity and Access Management
Evolving identity and access mechanisms to administer multiple cloud accounts and resources securely.
Security and Compliance
Implementing unified security, governance and compliance controls across all clouds, including tools, policies, reporting and organizational ownership.
Organization and Staffing
Adding specialized cloud roles, cross-skilling teams and augmenting with external experts to support multi-cloud operations.
IT Financial Management
Adopting FinOps practices for cost visibility, allocation, optimization and budgetary control across environments.
Realizing Multi-Cloud Success
Migrating multi-cloud is complex, requiring meaningful assessment to formulate execution strategies focused on business goals across parameters like responsiveness, resilience and economics. Organizations must invest in structured analysis of existing IT environments before committing major budgets to multi-cloud platforms.
Well-architected assessment processes deliver data-backed guidance for developing balanced, pragmatic strategies. They provide clarity on workload transitions, organizational change, security priorities, cost management and platform combinations. Getting assessments right ultimately enables realizing the full benefits of multi-cloud that no single vendor can offer.