A growing trend of hybrid and multi-Cloud architecture adoption is seen at the leading enterprises. An increasing number of companies want to improve their IT efficiency and increase their flexibility to meet the changing business and user demands. As stated in a study conducted by Crisp Research and initiated by QSC AG, more and more companies are using cloud services, and many of them are willing to shift infrastructures and tasks to external data centers. 80 percent of the companies surveyed said that either they already use cloud computing or are preparing to implement it soon. Almost 62 percent of them are exploring a combination of separate cloud providers for infrastructure (IaaS) and software (SaaS) services, or use multiple infrastructure (IaaS) providers – widely known as the multi-cloud environment.
Cloud Agility and Flexible Multi-Cloud Strategy to Improve Cloud Data Management
Despite significant advancements in Cloud computing and its services, companies are facing challenges in their transition to the Cloud. Traditional companies often struggle with hosting legacy IT systems, running on-premise structures in the company basement at external service providers. These environments are hard to combine with the cloud. For companies with very traditional structures, the transformation is much more difficult. Data geo-sovereignty, corporate policy compliance, security and identity and access management are one of the biggest organizational difficulties when it comes to realizing a multi-cloud-strategy. Low transparency regarding costs, and unclear cloud licensing models, are examples of the economic challenges faced. Another one in the same lines is a time-consuming billing process that comes with having different providers.
Planning and evaluating the multi-cloud strategy approach is not a cakewalk. Generally, companies are not in a position to steer multi-cloud operations all by themselves. Liaison between the ambitions and implementation has become a necessary aspect in the transition to hybrid and multi-Cloud architectures. Service providers and consultants are the ones expected to take over a part of the responsibility for operating, orchestrating, and optimizing the company’s infrastructure.
The report, entitled Gain the Ability for Cloud Agility: Assessing Enterprise Capacity to Embrace a Multi-Cloud Strategy assimilates extensive interviews with top IT executives from corporations like Viacom, The Coca-Cola Company, DHL, Embraer, and others.
The key findings of the report, include:
- More and more real-time applications and connected devices hitting in the market have led to explosive data growth in the Cloud – and businesses want to process that data to extract commercially useful patterns and correlations.
- Moving data across Cloud platforms seamlessly and without a need of extra processing is a technical and economic challenge when it comes to utilizing Cloud-specific applications and lower-priced services – IT executives desire for improvement in this area.
- Data replication across multi-Cloud environments can be costly and complex – Enterprises are continuously looking for solutions that enable them to implement an intelligent multi-cloud strategy.
Solutions around hybrid Cloud and multi-Cloud strategy are coming up rapidly. Various architectures are being developed with capabilities across storage, networking, security, application deployment, and management tools. The purpose is to make it easy for customers to integrate the cloud as a seamless and secure extension of existing investments.
