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The cloud is ubiquitous: according to GartnerSpending on public cloud services is projected to reach $396 billion in 2021, increasing 21.7% to $482 billion in 2022. Gartner predicts that by 2026, public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending. 2021.
But how fully do companies understand the potential benefits and potential limitations of the cloud as they race to migrate? In an evolving, complex environment, current offerings from major cloud players may not allow for the significant combination of flexibility and control that today’s organizations expect. At the same time, as companies move towards digital transformation, the number of corporate applications they use is increasing in each department.
This means that companies may need to reconsider and reassess their common cloud strategy assumptions, as well as rethink some of their investment decisions. For example, businesses may not increasingly want to be locked into using a single company’s software, and they are increasingly likely to use open source software. A growing number of cloud software services with open source expertise offer competitive alternatives to the proprietary portfolios of public cloud infrastructure companies.
As a result, the shape of cloud services and the issues organizations need to consider are changing. Here, we cover the common assumptions about cloud strategy and what organizations should consider to take full advantage of the cloud.
Assumption: Migrating to the cloud lowers costs and improves security
The two biggest arguments for migrating to the cloud are the opportunity to reduce overall IT spend and benefit from better security controls. However, while there is potential for cost savings, in many cases organizations overpay for convenience and costs can accumulate. For example, off-the-shelf cloud services are often more expensive than self-hosted, on-premises infrastructure if they are managed like legacy IT infrastructure. In the cloud, companies pay for the flexibility to quickly provision, de-provision, and scale, and have the opportunity to use this flexibility to reduce costs.
This led to the cloud comeback: In 2019, IDC expects up to 50% of public cloud workloads are sent back to on-premises infrastructure or private cloud to take advantage of the best option for specific workloads.
In terms of security, the cloud may have more complex controls that are easier to implement than on-premises infrastructure. However, the decentralized nature of the public cloud can open up a more complex security posture over which the organization does not have sufficient control. A latest IDC survey found that nearly every company has experienced some form of cloud data breach. This means that organizations must consider and evaluate the objectives of their IT security environment in every aspect of the cloud stack.
Assumption: Sticking to one cloud provider is best for business
While convenient, many enterprise-level organizations find that the standard box model of a large cloud provider does not meet their flexibility needs. Advanced IT organizations can find opportunities to flexibly move workloads between cloud providers and between the cloud and on-premises to optimize both cost and time to market.
It’s also important to understand that the “cloud provider” is not limited to the three major cloud infrastructure vendors; over time, more and more ISVs are becoming cloud providers in their own right. For example, an advanced database user can rely on high performance, complex behavior, and advanced configurations not found in the cloud provider’s managed offerings. Additionally, if this advanced database user is using an open source database like PostgreSQL, he or she will want this area of their stack to be serviced by a provider that is essentially a database company, not an infrastructure company that manages hundreds of other applications. Services. Today, with a trend towards decoupling cloud services, organizations can have more control over their database deployments in the cloud.
Finally, while hybrid architectures can reduce costs and increase flexibility, the data-centric nature of businesses today presents additional challenges. Moving data and databases is difficult and time consuming, and it can be particularly difficult to unwind and withdraw from private cloud data services. Independent cloud vendors can facilitate cost savings by unbundling cloud provider services that provide the freedom and flexibility provided by a cloud-neutral approach.
Assumption: The cloud is a mature landscape that will not change
Cloud is one of them. Fastest growing areas of IT spending between industries. However, while studies show that 92% of IT environments are already at least partially in the cloudAdoption of the enterprise cloud continues to be in the early stages of what will be a profound transformation for all organizations. Mature, far from a static environment, cloud technology is constantly evolving.
A significant technology shift in the cloud over the past decade has been the ongoing and dramatic reduction in the cost of computing and infrastructure. It has also become easier to make development tools and use programming languages, allowing development tools to spread to the rest of the organization, out of the jurisdiction of only IT professionals.
Finally, technical cloud expertise in different domains has spread among different service vendors as organizations prioritize reclaiming control over the convenience of a single public cloud. These providers are getting more creative in how to build a cloud service offering, such as database-as-a-service, which leaves the public cloud infrastructure and changes the definition of the managed service.
The evolution of the cloud: A balancing act
While there has been incredible growth and a tremendous amount of energy and discussion about the cloud, it is still relatively early in the evolution of the cloud. What has changed as organizations emerge from the early stages of cloud adoption is that companies want to reclaim higher control orders rather than sticking to a single cloud vendor. This is leading to a multicloud approach that involves more dynamic deployment between traditional on-premises and public cloud: According to Gartner’s 2020 cloud end-user purchasing behavior study, 76% of respondents reported using more than one cloud provider.
New ISVs are stepping into this evolving, evolving environment by reshaping managed services to reflect customer needs and offer greater expertise in specific cloud domains and open source platforms. As a result, cloud strategy efforts will become a balance between control and convenience as cloud services go through this decoupling and move away from monolithic architecture. Companies need to think strategically about which services from major cloud vendors to use and what services independent cloud providers can deliver with the required expertise.
This article was produced by Insights, the exclusive content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by the editorial staff of MIT Technology Review.
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