A robust multi-cloud management platform offers many benefits, including:

• Reduced strain on IT teams: By offering simplified, centralized management, a multi-cloud management solution allows IT teams to more effectively manage applications and workloads across multiple clouds.
• Visibility: Without multi-cloud management, it’s difficult to monitor workloads and know what’s running where in a complex environment that spans multiple cloud providers. A good multi-cloud management solution offers visibility across the entire multi-cloud environment in order to enable businesses to reap the benefits of multi-cloud.
• Security: It’s challenging to keep security policies consistent across cloud providers, andthe complexity of multi-cloud can contribute to security holes and an increased attack surface. A managed approach allows IT teams to deal with potential security issues proactively, rather than reactively. In addition, the best multi-cloud management platforms offer features such as security monitoring and automation, plus the ability to enforce security policies across platforms, which significantly reduces the difficulty of keeping your environment secure.
•  Cost management: While many businesses adopt a multi-cloud strategy to take advantage of discounts and cost savings offered by different cloud providers, it’s easy to lose track of costs in the increased complexity of a multi-cloud environment. Multi-cloud management helps your business keep track of costs and usage, and some platforms even use intelligent data analysis to optimize cost management.
• Increased availability: Availability is just one of the many advantages that businesses seek when they pursue a multi-cloud strategy. But to fully realize the benefits of multi-cloud, IT teams need to be able to duplicate and seamlessly migrate workloads when one environment fails. Effective multi-cloud management allows that to happen.
  

There are many multi-cloud management strategies and solutions, but the best ones share a number of common features. Perhaps the most powerful is compatibility with containers, which enable workloads to be moved across multiple cloud providers more easily than virtual machines. Thus, support for containers and Kubernetes is key to a robust multi-cloud management platform..

Automation is another feature of effective multi-cloud management solutions. Automation allows IT teams to deploy, monitor and secure applications quickly and reliably, and to scale their operations without becoming overwhelmed. In this way, automation helps businesses manage the complexity of multi-cloud environments.

Moving workloads across a multi-cloud environment begins with ensuring that they are portable. You’ll need to make sure that a workload can be moved without the need for significant changes, while also maintaining its cloud-native elements. Many companies are turning to containers for easier workload portability; each container is a lightweight package of one app and its dependencies, making them easier to move across different clouds and environments

You’ll also want to make sure that application management is consistent across clouds, and this is where a cloud management platform comes in handy. Proper cloud management helps you enforce consistent policies across your cloud environments and choose the best platform for each application. 

Finally, know when (and why) to move workloads to a different public cloud. Even when using containers, it still takes some effort to move workloads, and there’s always a risk of lowered performance in the new environment. This is why a thoughtfully planned multi-cloud strategy is so important: Are you aiming for redundant deployments in order to increase resiliency? Or are you using a distributed deployment strategy based on running each workload in the environment that suits it best? Decide what your goal is, and then move your workloads only in support of that goal.