The world is becoming increasingly “multi-cloud”. Businesses are now leveraging services from multiple providers to achieve a higher level of efficiencies and take advantage of the strengths of different clouds and economies of scale while avoiding vendor or price “lock-ins”. Multi-cloud also bolsters a company’s resilience and risk management by offering redundant backup and recovery capabilities and allow it to easily switch to another cloud service provider when faced with unexpected emergencies.

The problem is that going multi-cloud adds considerable complexity to an organisation’s IT environment, especially in terms of visibility and control over data and applications that are strewn across different clouds as well as on-prem data centres. The challenge becomes even greater when a business does not possess a highly skilled IT team that is capable of configuring and managing each of the different platforms.

How can businesses gain control of data when the data is everywhere?
As we touched on above, businesses have to be able to gain visibility and control over their data no matter where it is located. In order to achieve this, it is best to use one platform that allows you to see the data across your organisation and easily migrate to move and recover any data or workloads to any cloud. This increases the agility of your data. Besides being able to call upon the data whenever you need it most, you can also move it to where it will deliver the most value to gain strategic and competitive advantage.

To rein in the complexity of multi-site and multi-cloud environments, businesses need to consider taking an intelligent data management approach seriously.

According to Veeam’s Cloud Data Management Report, a successful data management strategy in today’s multi-cloud landscape is distinguished by four core attributes:

• Cloud - There are no two ways about it. Modern businesses have to rely on cloud for their data management, backup and disaster recovery (DR) due to the high reliability, flexibility and data security that it can provide. Cloud democratises powerful technologies such as data management, DR and AI, making them more accessible and cost-effective for any company. In the report, Veeam states that for many companies, “Cloud Data Management is a key component of Intelligent Data Management”.

• Capabilities - Organisations have worked towards upskilling their employees’ digital skills to be able to adapt and take on new technological approaches. Employees, meanwhile, have to be open to improving their skills to stay relevant.

• Culture - Speaking of openness, as businesses digitally transform and embrace new multi-cloud possibilities, their whole culture has to become more open and accepting, from employee to upper management-level.

• Confidence - Lastly, confidence breeds confidence. Businesses, as well as their customers, need to have the belief that their data is not only trustworthy and secure, but it is always available whenever it is needed 24.7.365. They need a platform that can help them address the most pressing digital challenges to give them that confidence.

Veeam Cloud Data Management is an example of a platform that allows organisations to achieve unparalleled data availability, visibility, automation, and governance across data centres, at the edge and in the cloud. Having these capabilities can tremendously help drive your company’s digital transformation forward. ​

However, this is just scratching the surface with regards to the importance of Intelligent Data Management and how businesses can implement it successfully. To help you get a better grasp of the approach, we suggest that you watch this engaging discussion among data management experts from Veeam, Cisco and LinxDataCenter on working in a multi-cloud environment and the challenges that go along this journey.

They also touch on:

• How the current multi-cloud, highly distributed world looks like

• The challenges of maintaining and managing multi-cloud data

• How to protect your data across clouds and who is responsible for doing this

• The advantages of HCI in a multi-cloud environment

• The challenges that service providers are facing with multi-cloud

• And more!

To watch the discussion, click here.