Cloud services adoption continues to grow unabated, across industries and geographies. The total global cloud computing market is large; Gartner estimates it will grow to $917 billion by 2025, overtaking traditional IT spend. Cloud services offer customers increased agility and efficiency. By shifting infrastructure to a service based model, customers no longer have to do the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building and managing IT infrastructure and software platforms, enabling them to focus on their core competencies.
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Cloud providers, unsurprisingly, prefer for customers to pick and stay within the walled garden of their native services and partner ecosystem. Customers usually end up as customers of a particular cloud provider because a line of business or developer decided to pick that provider to build an application outside of normal IT/CIO purview. As they are cementing long term strategy though, customers should zoom out and take a long term view of their requirements, at the enterprise level.
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More than 15 years of public cloud experience has taught us that all clouds are not equal. Providers have key differentiators or areas they specialize in and availability, competition, and cost are all valid considerations for users to assess. The reality is that a single cloud vendor isn’t always the best strategy.
In fact, hybrid cloud continues to be the leading strategy for many organizations. If you are contemplating a hybrid or multi-cloud approach, consider assessing:
- Balancing security with innovation: Organizations have multiple platforms–some of which may be outdated and unsupported–on which they need to run workloads. This creates management complexity, security risks, and decreases efficiency. An open hybrid or multi-cloud solution enables them to deploy and manage their workloads consistently across any environment.
- Skillset of their IT team: Technology is a rapidly changing industry and oftentimes organizations don’t have the resources to dedicate to building applications and managing their infrastructure across this hybrid landscape. A multi or open hybrid cloud approach enables teams to leverage existing resources by simplifying and automating processes.
- Portability of their current infrastructure: Organizations also have a mix of application types. They need a consistent platform and tools to build and run both legacy applications and modern cloud-native applications, enabling them to control costs and migrate workloads based on their business needs.A multi-cloud approach helps organizations modernize applications that are core to the business, while delivering new and innovative applications faster.
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There are many strong solutions for organizations looking to upgrade their infrastructure to the cloud. The key to a successful environment is not to focus on a singular solution or the one with the quickest deployment, but to approach the task with a holistic view. By focusing on the results the company would like to see at an enterprise level, along with factoring in the considerations mentioned above, IT leaders can feel confident in their decision to shift to a hybrid cloud architecture.
