The multi-cloud era

With digitization the topic of discussion in almost every boardroom since the onset of COVID-19, it’s no coincidence that migration to the cloud has skyrocketed in tandem. In fact, at the onset of the pandemic, 87% of IT decision-makers noted that the remote restructuring of the workplace would push their organizations to accelerate cloud migrations.

That trend shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, Gartner predicts that cloud spending will increase by 23% in 2021 to reach $332B. Driving this historic shift is the adoption of multi-cloud infrastructures. Businesses are increasingly separating and distributing their data flows and critical functions across multiple clouds from different service providers. According to Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud Report, an overwhelming 92% of enterprises say they now have a multi-cloud strategy, and 82% say they have a hybrid cloud strategy.

In the other hand, Hashicorp first-ever State of Cloud Strategy Survey uncovers some very clear results: a common multi-cloud operating model has become the de facto standard for IT organizations of all shapes and sizes to deliver on digital transformation. IT organizations are investing significant resources in multi-cloud deployments, and those investments are already paying off. At the same time, however, companies are still dealing with a variety of multi-cloud challenges and dependencies. Here are some of the main measures that the report indicates:

Cloud/multi-cloud adoption

Multi-cloud is now an everyday reality. Already, ¾ of survey respondents employ a multi-cloud architecture (more than one cloud, public or private). In two years, almost 9 in 10 will do so.

The prevalence of Cloud Centers of Excellence (CCoE) is also growing, especially among organizations with larger cloud budgets. Almost ⅔ of companies with annual cloud budgets of $5 million or more operated a CCoE, compared to just 40% of all respondents.

Cloud providers used/planned to use

In terms of cloud providers, AWS is the most use and it will remaine so for the next 2 years, following by Microsoft and Google Cloud. Also the prediction of Alibaba indicates that Asia-Pacific and Europe are the main areas of growing of this plataform having less incidence in North America.

Multi-cloud success

Going multi-cloud gives businesses multi-choices when it comes to cloud. The multi-cloud platform offers businesses the ability to utilise the best of every platform, to mix together an infrastructure specific to an individual business depending on their organisational goals. On average, businesses use four different clouds to manage their data, infrastructure and operating systems. In terms of the success, most surveys respond that they achieve their bussines goals, been more significant for large enterprises.

You might find the perfect cloud solution for one aspect of your enterprise, a proprietary cloud fine-tuned for hosting a proprietary app, an affordable cloud perfect for archiving public records, a cloud that scales broadly for hosting systems with highly variable use rates, but no single cloud can do everything. Multicloud helps enterprises avoid the pitfalls of single-vendor reliance. Spreading workloads across multiple cloud vendors gives enterprises flexibility to use (or stop using) a cloud whenever they want. At SouthLights our devops teams have a wide experience in multi-cloud technology, contact us so we can help your organization to migrate, implement or improve a multi-cloud environment.

Sources: devops.com, hashicorp.com