The explosion of cloud adoption has also facilitated an eruption of cloud providers and platforms to support IT, with each offering a unique combination of tools and functions. One of the key benefits of the cloud ecosystem is enabling choice for different users, groups, and projects in the organization, but this means embracing multiple cloud platforms (multicloud).According to a new blueprint from Info-Tech Research Group, multicloud is an inevitability for most organizations and IT teams and leaders must prepare for the new challenges and opportunities it brings.
The global IT research and advisory firm’s new research-based resource was created to help IT organizations understand multicloud, adapt their approach and tools to a multicloud strategy, and leverage best practices and principles that will assist them in maintaining control of the volatility and complexity that comes with multicloud.
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“Embracing multicloud in an organization is an opportunity to enable choice and empower users to be more productive and creative, but it’s important to understand the nuances of how to maintain control,” says Nabeel Sherif, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group. “Although it increases complexity for both IT operations and governance, multicloud is manageable and worth the benefits when the necessary tools and principles are in place.With the right approach, multicloud can simultaneously reduce the IT burden and increase business agility.”
Info-Tech’s resource explains that multicloud is usually not a choice for most organizations. The requirement to integrate with partners, subsidiaries, and parent organizations, as well as the need to access key applications in the SaaS ecosystem, means that transitioning to multicloud is a matter of when, not if. To be best prepared, IT leaders must consider how to arrive at a multicloud solution with intent and how to best use it to their advantage.
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While embracing multicloud may seem overwhelming, in this blueprint the research and advisory firm highlights three major benefits IT leaders can expect when moving to multicloud with intention and purpose, as outlined below:
- Increased flexibility and accelerated integration: Because multicloud increases the number of platforms and environments available, it can also be used to increase agility from both a development and operations (DevOps) perspective as well as a resource deployment one. Multicloud can also be a catalyst for integrating resources and services that were previously isolated from one another, as the modular design and application programming interface (API) architecture prevalent in cloud services can be easily consumed and integrated with each other.
- Modernized data strategy: A proactive multicloud approach allows for visibility and control over the data ecosystem. Defining data architecture and policies with the consideration of multicloud supports the understanding of data flows and how they impact the business.
- Move to cloud-native IT and design: If there have been blocks in digital transformation, embracing multicloud is an opportunity to streamline previously fragmented applications, services, and workloads and instead lopen standards built to deliver cloud-native power and portability.Multicloud also enables the building of automations that increase reliability, performance, and cost effectiveness while reducing the total in-house IT burden.
Info-Tech Research Group suggests that multicloud also offers multiple right places for many workloads, especially for IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS), which means multiple footprints can be used for secondary locations as required for portability, resilience, and high availability. However, portability is always a matter of balancing increased flexibility, availability, and resilience against increased complexity, maintenance effort, and cost. Understanding the requirements for the IT organization’s workload and applying portability efforts where they make the most sense is critical when transitioning to multicloud.
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