The majority of the medium to large companies currently source their workloads and private cloud applications from their own data centers. According to studies, this will change significantly in the upcoming years. For the coming year, the analysts predict a further significant increase in the use of public clouds. Hybrid Clouds would become the rule, and managers in future rely heavily on the Multi Cloud, which contains public cloud services from various providers. Researchers expect that in the future various workloads will be distributed to different public clouds. Or that cloud resources are sourced for operation and backup from different cloud providers.
IT decision makers were asked in various surveys where they run their business applications today, where they want to run them in the future, and what their challenges are. Result: The use of multiple clouds in the enterprise will rise sharply in the next years. In particular, hybrid cloud – defined as the combined use of at least one private cloud with a public cloud, including a degree of integration between the two cloud environments – have an extremely steep curve. Arguments for cloud usage are lower cost, flexibility and agility in operations are among the cloud benefits from a user perspective. Many user companies also pursue a best-of-breed approach in the cloud. Different cloud providers have different priorities. In particular, the technical and commercial complexity as well as problems with data integration are causing headaches in the operation of multi-cloud environments.
In order to handle the complexity of handling multi-cloud infrastructures, many companies are working together with external service providers. So that we are not doing mistaken: even in 2019, enterprise workloads are still preferably hosted in the traditional, traditional data center.
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Companies still prefer to store their data and applications in their own data center, in half of all cases, this is already possible in combination with a private cloud in this data center. Since it is only a small step from the private cloud to the hybrid cloud, hybrid IT environments are more common.
The public cloud usually consists of using an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). One could think of craft enterprises that operate their bookkeeping in this way, especially since they are little threatened by industrial espionage.
Businesses around the world tend to relocate their workloads in hybrid cloud environments within the next one to two years. By the end of 2020, 19 percent of all the companies will have different clouds in operation.
Multi-cloud scenarios become the rule, use cases around a single cloud – private or public – increasingly rare. Even the “pure” data center without a cloud is becoming an obsolete model.
The main reason for the change in opinion among the IT managers regarding the use of public clouds is clearly to mention the changed attitude towards the security of public clouds. After the hysteria of the early years in terms of data security, the industry now draws a different picture: clouds are considered no less secure than the in-house data center. Only in terms of performance is the cloud even more appreciated by the IT managers.
The primary focus of the Hybrid Cloud and Multi Cloud will be on hosting productive applications, rather than often testing. This is a quasi natural consequence of the DevOps euphoria of the past few years, in which software development and IT operations have become increasingly interlinked.
Most of the senior IT managers declared DevOps to be indispensable given shorter innovation cycles in software development. At that time, the main goals of DevOps initiatives were the rapid deployment of new software features, innovative products and services. Exactly these are the reasons why the hybrid and multi cloud are now spreading in the data centers.
IT managers often cite the independence of individual providers, ie the avoidance of vendor lock-in, as an important reason for using several public clouds. But also and especially the improvements in application mobility and interoperability between cloud environments provides a valid reason for the planned use of multiple clouds, the study authors speak of a widespread application-first approach. It is important to provide applications faster than the competition. Such applications are now written in the cloud for clouds – compiled with microservices, ported by container, and managed and orchestrated using management consoles. However, this is exactly what sets many companies up against unsolvable tasks.
The Hybrid and Multi Cloud will determine the IT infrastructure of many medium and large companies in the coming years. The management of these complex environments will present the IT leaders with challenges that they can hardly solve on their own with their own team. The parallel and networked operation of various infrastructure components requires numerous and sometimes new human and technical resources. The necessary skills would be increasingly built up through training. But the design and interaction of IT and cloud architecture and workloads is becoming increasingly difficult as IT demands grow. If companies want to ensure parallel and on-demand networking across different cloud infrastructures, they need the right human and technical resources. Finally, many companies would seek access to know-how and appropriate technologies in service providers and managed service providers. Either way, IT decision-makers who are in the midst of the cloud transformation and orchestration phase should consider deploying Managed Cloud Providers.
