The Rise of Multi-Cloud Discovery: Enhancing Visibility and Control

Published: Jun 2024

Multi-cloud capabilities are presenting novel opportunities for enterprises in the modern world. They provide the much-desired cloud computing agility and scalability. Companies are utilizing several clouds of varied services from numerous cloud computing vendors. However, the managing and monitoring of these multi-clouds with the diversity of platforms is a challenging and tedious process. This has led to the emergence of the multi-cloud discovery space which is currently offering solutions that will help in the visibility, control, and governance of distributed cloud resources. Multi-cloud discovery solutions also can pinpoint Configuration Items (CIs), applications, and other assets within various cloud environments to support extensive monitoring and management of multi-cloud infrastructure as a whole. These solutions ensure that enterprises get a complete and comprehensive view and analysis of their multi-cloud environments to lay effective cloud strategies, improve resource utilization, and meet regulatory demands.

Market Overview

The multi-cloud discovery market is emerging as a vibrant sector due to the increased multi-cloud usage by organizations. Enterprises are adopting hybrid cloud environments to support service and infrastructure heterogeneity. This multi-cloud strategy ensures that modern businesses can take advantage of different cloud services — Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and more. The requirement for different applications is further enhancing this trend. 

Cloud discovery platforms offer the much-needed details on CIs, help in highlighting possible security threats, and make it easier to oversee the multi-cloud environment. It is forecasted that this market will achieve growth at a CAGR of 17.6% by (2024 -2031). The multi-cloud discovery solutions market is rising, with the growing demands for scalable IT resources that can easily adapt to changing business needs. Also, the increasing security and regulatory challenges are significantly driving the market as these solutions provide comprehensive visibility and management of cloud resources. Additionally, the increasing necessity to optimize cloud computing costs makes multi-cloud discovery an attractive option provided that it assists companies in streamlining their spending.

Growth Drivers and Emerging Trends 

The multi-cloud discovery market is showing growth, mainly as a result of organizations’ use of multi-cloud approaches to create clouds from the features and services of various cloud providers. This trend is increasing due to the increasing demand for many types of services that need to be elastic, expandable, and unique, which can only be accomplished through the use of several cloud services. In the recent past, most organizations have adopted a multi-cloud model in which they implement several cloud services in their operations. The emphasis on tracking application and dependency visibility and management across multiple clouds has increased the significance of CI tracking for at-risk apps and the overall visibility of a full multi-cloud environment. 

One of the major factors that has contributed to the multi-cloud strategy growth, is the threat of vendor lock-in that is unique to the cloud offerings. It is also possible to outsource to several cloud vendors to achieve efficiency and diversification. Thus, multi-cloud technologies offer powerful solutions for organizations to accommodate their increasingly disparate cloud environments.

Technological Advancement and Innovation 

Technological advancements in multi-cloud discovery are providing solutions to transform businesses. Legacy frameworks such as, the Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) that were created for the standard, IT-led deployment change cannot process the ever-evolving, dynamic character of cloud workloads. This has presented the need for a new generation of tools that can offer unified visibility and management of different multi-cloud services. 

For instance, BMC Helix Discovery includes a multi-cloud discovery and dependency mapping solution that can accommodate large and complex settings, particularly AWS and Azure. Its discovery is agentless and API-based which provides a real-time, connected, and comprehensive view of data center and multi-cloud resources. 

The use of AI and ML in these solutions brings more value to continuous monitoring, finding anomalies, and making predictions to minimize human interference. Additionally, most of the solutions today include data encryption, access controls, and works with sets of necessary regulatory checks, to ensure optimal security. Thus, the recent innovations in software-defined networking include more focus on the implementation of hybrid and multi-cloud setups. 

 For instance, Dell Technologies’ new generation of modular joint infrastructure and software solutions, offer block, file, object, and data protection storage services with high-speed, and low-latency access to the foremost public cloud such as AWS, AZURE, GOOGLE CLOUD, and ORACLE CLOUD. This enables organizations to harness their preferred public cloud computing and application services. Seamlessly hop from one cloud to another without data transit, minimize risks associated with vendor lock-in, and avoid instances where one is charged hefty fees to transfer data out of a provider’s environment. 

Machine discovery-based solutions have been an area of innovation and focus of Microsoft, especially AI and ML-powered free solutions for multi-cloud discovery and monitoring of resources. AWS and Google Cloud have been occupying more of their resources to support hybrid and multi-cloud which makes the elongation easy between multiple cloud services.

Challenges to Multi-Cloud Technology

Several risks and problems are characterized in the multi-cloud discovery market. One of the key challenges is cloud management and resource optimization in various environments. It requires a complex approach to handling cloud resources. Thus, organizations are adopting the security framework and the ever-increasing adoption of cloud security that would protect their data and ensure that they are regulatory compliant. They also currently use cloud management platforms and orchestration tools to empower themselves for managing cloud and service complexities including multi-cloud and more.

Moreover, companies are focusing on training and crowd-sourcing programs as well as engaging the services of comprehensively-versed cloud experts to address the skills gap and develop necessary competencies in overseeing the scaling of cloud infrastructures. Hence, these issues also open up new avenues for success in this multi-cloud discovery area. 

To sum up, the multi-cloud discovery market is proving to be a valuable opportunity for the concerned businesses that wish to improve the efficiency and security of the cloud infrastructure as well as manage the operations of the cloud platforms that are in use across different clouds. The modern world is preparing to witness some of the greatest technological advancement and multi-cloud discovery technologies can be helpful in this regard to address the complexities in modern cloud architectures. Cloud advancements make digital transformation and data management strategies far more competitive leading to business growth.