Cisco : Getting to the How of Multicloud

Customers are moving beyond thinking about what multicloud is, when it's coming (it's already here) or why it's accelerating. At this point, we are in a new phase, where customers need to know how to navigate the complexity and power their next wave of multicloud initiatives. Since introducing the Cisco Multicloud Portfolio last October, we've seen many customers use it to guide their investments. While every customer is unique and has different paths to cloud adoption, we've seen common consumption-related use cases emerge with large and small organizations. In this blog, we are going to focus on how we help customers consume cloud services.

Helping Control Consumption in Large Enterprises

Some of the larger enterprises we've worked with face complexity caused by having wide range of IT consumers and a diversity of workloads deployed across multiple on-premises and public cloud environments. Mitigating the potential risks requires that they focus on governance and control capabilities.

One government department CIO we worked with had a vision to streamline and standardize IT services as they moved the majority of IT to the public cloud. The CIO had already chosen two main public cloud providers and surprisingly (or not) found that business teams were using credit cards to pay for cloud services outside of the selected suppliers. With over 32,000 employees and IT services across 12 different business units, it was nearly impossible to control these purchases and manage the overall spend.

They needed a cloud management platform that would enable governance and cost controls across these consumer groups and dispersed environments.

Cisco CloudCenter was selected to standardize IT services and help implement governance and cost control. They started by proving they could automate the development and deployment of test workloads in the cloud, before considering migration of production applications. Obvious benefits, such as the flexibility to choose deployment environments and avoiding public cloud provider lock-in, were immediate. Adopting a multicloud management solution like CloudCenter also helped them avoid waste which lowered their cost.

Simplifying Consumption for Small and Medium Enterprises

Smaller businesses face different challenges. Many don't have existing cloud skills or enough staff to become experts on every cloud environment. Budgets can be tight and spend is prioritized on innovation. A great example of this is a small, commercial, yet global Cisco customer that was in the process of integrating two businesses in two different countries after a merger. The two businesses had different manual IT operations processes in the UK and US, which led to poor communication between development and outsourced operations, frequent outages, and a three-month wait for a simple request for a virtual machine.

Cisco helped them reinvent their IT service delivery strategy. Cisco CloudCenter, integrated with ServiceNow service request portal, provided a common interface for various development groups, automating the deployment of service requests in multiple data centers and public clouds including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The single portal provided standardized and simplified consumption of IT services and helped to improve quality and speed of delivery via automation in both on and off-premises environments.

As customers navigate the multicloud world, they need to tame complexity, connect, protect, consume, and get expert advisory on cloud services in a consistent way, on or off-premises. The Cisco Multicloud Portfolio includes the essential elements to guide multicloud investments. Aligning our cloud offerings under these common needs, enable our customers to choose the right solutions to simplify and secure their cloud initiatives.

What multicloud initiatives are you planning for your organization? Share your experience in the comments below.