The push to cloud migration is only expanding, and for many organizations the initial motivation of reduced costs or a better customer experience is making way for strategies focused on innovation. The fast pace of change will continue, but enterprises who value agility in pursuit of innovation will be looking for a strategy to adopt a multi-cloud environment.
In many cases, this journey to multi-cloud begins with enterprises coming to the realization that it’s impossible to succeed without dedicating more of their time, effort and budget to innovation. This is generally approached with a combination of strategies to cut costs and an effort to migrate more workloads to the cloud, with multi-cloud increasingly a common solution.
This focus on innovation is often a later priority as enterprises embrace multi-cloud solutions. What begins as a pursuit of redundancy for security purposes or the avoidance of provider lock-in eventually emerges as an innovation strategy and it becomes a key benefit of a multi-cloud environment.
From infrastructure to innovation: In the early days of cloud computing, the focus was infrastructure, with providers keeping pace with one another in terms of network connections, solutions for storage and instance types. Platform-level services gave enterprises the ability to add database instances and other applications.
As the cloud market is maturing, innovation is shifting to more complex innovation, from big data to the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. This new level of innovation is causing enterprises to look at multi-cloud a bit differently. They realize that the rapid pace of technology innovation requires them to access more than one cloud solution to keep pace with their competitors.
How enterprises can plan for a multi-cloud environment:
Create a data management plan: Data management remains one of the biggest challenges for IT. From collecting and securely storing it, to processing it for useful application and then eventually retiring it, the complexity can be a lot to manage. Enterprises need a comprehensive approach to data, with location, accessibility, security, privacy and durability all requiring attention.
Your strategy should be ready for multi-cloud. If you’re pursuing cloud migration, you should assume that one cloud will not be enough. The pace of innovation requires you to incorporate more than one cloud into your strategy.
Look at applications holistically: Your application is complex and requires a variety of support structures for successful hosting in the cloud or across multiple clouds. Whether it’s run in your data center or at the edge, think more broadly about what you need to support a flexible application in the cloud.
Don’t let multi-cloud “happen” without a strategy: If you don’t work on a strategy for multi-cloud, shadow IT will gradually make it your reality without your input. Don’t force your enterprise into a do-it-yourself setting, where developers create fragmented solutions to cover what your enterprise needs.
To learn more about how multi-cloud environments foster innovation for your enterprise, or to discuss leveraging multi-cloud solutions for your needs, contact us at Truth Comm.