Cloud Portability: Unlocking Flexibility for Your Business and Applications

For those driving cloud architectural strategy, portability has raised its head as yet another non-functional requirement to take into consideration. Organisations require the flexibility to move workloads wherever they want to enhance resiliency, mitigate concentration risk, or take advantage of a unique cloud service provider (CSP) capability. In Europe, emerging regulations like the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) require financial services companies to demonstrate resiliency and CSP exit strategies. 

“As global organisations continue migrating business-critical applications to the cloud, tying themselves into a single CSP, with potential lock-in, can feel short-sighted.” said Roy Long, Founder and Cloud Evangelist at cloud services company skyPurple Cloud. “The constant top-down pressure to deliver innovation quickly – especially with respect to AI and more specifically generative AI – also underscores the benefits of not being restricted to a single cloud.” 

“In many ways, your portability strategy is your multicloud strategy. Many organisations want to accelerate their journey to cloud with portability in mind, whether from a cost, compliance, or risk perspective, and a mature cloud networking architecture is required to deliver on this strategy,” said Long. 

If you’re concerned about the regulations or just architecting for the future, here are some key considerations and steps. 

Create Consistent Architecture 

A lack of common features and functionality across the major CSPs with regards to network and security infrastructure is a crucial hurdle in the journey to portability. How do you abstract away the complexity of different cloud native network constructs, and drive centralised security policy, all while ensuring such policy is enforced consistently across all CSPs?  

When done right, creating consistent architecture greatly simplifies management and operations by providing a unified framework across diverse CSPs. This consistency enhances agility, allowing organisations to deploy applications where they make the most business sense, architecting across different clouds, optimizing performance and cost-efficiency. Moreover, it fortifies security and compliance efforts, as standardised architecture can ensure consistent enforcement of policies. Consistency also facilitates scalability, making it feasible to leverage the scalability features of different cloud providers.  

At Aviatrix, we strive to simplify the creation of enterprise-grade, consistent architecture. The solution allows platform and application teams the agility to leverage the CSP whose services best meet their application requirements while simplifying and reducing the cost of delivering advanced networking, security, and consistent operational control unavailable from any CSP. Our Secure Cloud Networking also offers many benefits to the business that overcome native cloud limitations. 

Ultimately, a consistent architecture empowers enterprises to make strategic, data-driven decisions, fostering innovation and agility while maintaining robust security and compliance standards, all of which are essential in the modern multicloud era. 

Build a Multicloud Skillset 

The skills gap in enterprise cloud networking is an increasingly pressing concern as organisations accelerate their digital transformations. With the rapid adoption of cloud technologies, there’s a growing demand for professionals who possess a deep understanding of cloud networking concepts, architecture, and security. However, the supply of such skilled individuals often lags behind.  

This gap can manifest in various ways, from challenges in designing and optimizing cloud networks to ensuring robust security controls. Multiply those challenges across CSPs, all of which use vastly different tools, and you have a recipe for costly complexity. Bridging this gap requires a concerted effort from both educational institutions and businesses, focusing on specialised training programs, certifications, and hands-on experience to equip professionals with the expertise needed to navigate the complexities of cloud networking successfully.  

In an effort to harness our team’s expertise towards a solution, we’ve created the Aviatrix Certified Engineer (ACE) Program – the industry’s first and only multicloud networking certification. It provides learning paths that teach how to build, operate, automate, scale, and secure cloud networks across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The ACE Program has trained 20,000+ engineers worldwide, but there are only 22 ACE Design Experts – the highest level of certification you can achieve. We look forward to inducting the next class of ACE Design Experts into this elite group following their presentations in London 13-14 September 2023. 

Addressing the multicloud skills gap is pivotal in ensuring that organisations can fully harness the potential of the cloud and deliver against portability requirements while maintaining the integrity and security of their networks. 

Mind Your Monitoring and Management 

Beyond designing and implementing your cloud network, the importance of architecting for monitoring and management is essential for ensuring portability, where workloads may be distributed or moved across various cloud providers and regions. Network architects must ensure real-time visibility into network performance, security, and compliance, which is essential for maintaining operational excellence. This real-time visibility simplifies troubleshooting, as issues can be quickly identified and addressed across the entire cloud ecosystem, reducing downtime and enhancing user experiences. Streamlined monitoring and management also lead to better cost control by providing insights into resource utilization, enabling organisations to optimise their cloud spending. 

Aviatrix CoPilot is the cloud networking and security operations centre and a core part of Aviatrix Secure Cloud Networking. It delivers consistent, centralised, enterprise-grade operational control and troubleshooting capabilities across all cloud environments.   

Regardless of the solution you use, efficient monitoring and management that’s consistent across CSPs is a linchpin of agility, security, cost-efficiency, and overall success for streamlined portability. 

What Does Portability Look Like in the Real World? 

We are actively working with a number of U.K. enterprise and financial services organisations who are seeking to achieve portability, providing the flexibility that comes with being hybrid and multicloud-enabled, while staying compliant with evolving regulations. A large British insurance marketplace has different applications in different clouds. Regulatory requirements may differ, but its goal is portability, and being able to move workloads where they find the best fit. 

skyPurple Cloud has had many conversations with customers within the life sciences industry around machine learning (ML) in public cloud. Some have expressed interest in utilising ML services across multiple cloud providers, regardless of where their core infrastructure resides. Harnessing the power of Aviatrix, skyPurple Cloud is developing a multicloud, web-based sentiment analysis application, with direct relevance to the life sciences industry. The solution utilises best-of-breed ML services from three public cloud platforms, enabling complex analysis with increased accuracy using the best training frameworks and models available. The results from each ML service will be provided with respective scoring and combined for even better accuracy when appropriate. All data transmitted across and between the cloud platforms will be securely transmitted, with Aviatrix’s industry-leading technology providing the network backbone, security, and visibility. 

Aviatrix is in a unique position in providing these companies with a solution that delivers flexibility in deploying workloads in any or all clouds while enabling interoperability, visibility, controlling costs, and helping address regulatory, data protection, and cloud network security challenges. 

If you want to discuss your cloud or portability goals, contact us today. Our cloud networking experts are ready and available to help you understand your options.