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Eliminate three common hypotheses of cloud strategy

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Cloud is everywhere: According to Gartner, spending on public cloud services is projected to reach $ 396 billion in 2021 and grow to $ 48.7 billion in 21.22% by 2022. 2021.

But how much do companies understand the potential benefits — and potential limitations — of the cloud as they race to migrate? In an evolving complex landscape, the current offerings of 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 business applications they use is growing in all departments.

This means that companies need to rethink and review common cloud strategy hypotheses, as well as rethink some investment decisions. For example, companies may no longer be blocked from using a company’s software, and it is increasingly likely that they will use open source software. The growing number of cloud software services with open source experience offers competitive alternatives to the property portfolios of public cloud infrastructure companies.

As a result, the form of cloud services — and the issues that organizations need to consider — is changing. Here, we address common assumptions about cloud strategy and what organizations need to consider to take full advantage of the benefits of the cloud.

Assumption: Migrating to the cloud will reduce costs and increase security

One of the two biggest arguments for cloud migration is the ability to reduce overall IT spending and take advantage of better security controls. However, while there is potential for cost savings, in many cases, organizations pay extra for convenience, and costs can accumulate. For example, outdoor cloud services are typically more expensive than local self-hosted infrastructure if they are managed like old IT infrastructure. In the cloud, companies pay for the flexibility to supply, supply, and scale quickly, and are able to use that flexibility to reduce costs.

This has led to the cloud coming home: In 2019, IDC announced up to 50% of the public cloud workload it would return to local infrastructure or private cloud to take advantage of the best option for specific workloads.

In terms of security, clouds can have more sophisticated controls to implement that are easier to implement than local facility infrastructure. However, the decentralized nature of the public cloud can open up a more complex security stance, and the organization may not have enough control. A The latest IDC survey they found that almost all companies have suffered some form of cloud data breach. This means that companies need to consider and evaluate the goals of their IT security environment in all areas of the cloud stack.

Assumption: Joining a cloud provider is best for business

While it may be convenient, many business-class organizations see the standard box model of a major cloud provider as not meeting their flexibility needs. Sophisticated IT organizations can find opportunities to optimize costs and time to market by moving workloads flexibly between cloud providers and between cloud and on-premises.

It is also important to understand that the “cloud provider” is not limited to large cloud infrastructure vendors; over time more and more ISVs are becoming cloud providers per se. For example, an advanced database user might rely on high-performance, sophisticated behavior, and advanced configurations that are not available in cloud provider-managed offerings. In addition, if this advanced database user uses an open source database like PostgreSQL, they will likely want to serve that stack of their field by a provider that is basically a database company, not an infrastructure company that manages hundreds of other applications. one and services. Today, the trend towards cloud service delivery allows organizations to regain greater control over the deployment of cloud databases.

Finally, while hybrid architecture can alleviate costs and increase flexibility, today’s data-driven nature of companies poses additional challenges. Moving data and databases is difficult and time consuming, and can be particularly difficult to disconnect and back up from proprietary cloud data services. Independent cloud vendors can facilitate cost savings by separating the services of cloud providers, which provides the freedom and flexibility that sets them apart from a cloud perspective.

Assumption: The cloud is a mature landscape that will not change

The cloud is one of them the fastest growing areas of IT spending across industries. But while studies show that 92% of IT environments are already partly in the cloud, the adoption of the business cloud is in the early stages of what will be a profound transformation for all businesses. Far from a mature and static landscape, cloud technology is constantly evolving.

A major technological change in the cloud over the last decade has been a tremendous reduction in the cost of computing and infrastructure. The development of development tools and the use of programming languages ​​has also made it easier for development tools to go beyond the sole competence of computer specialists, extending them to other organizations.

Finally, as organizations prioritize regaining control over the convenience of a single public cloud, the technical cloud in different areas has spread among different service vendors. These providers are more creative about how to build a cloud service offering (e.g., a database as a service) that differentiates it from public cloud infrastructure and changes the definition of managed service.

Evolution of the cloud: action of balance

Despite the tremendous growth and tremendous energy and debate about the cloud, it is still quite early in the evolution of the cloud. What is changing in the organization from the early stages of cloud adoption is that companies want to regain greater control demands, rather than sticking to a single cloud provider. This includes a multi-cloud approach that includes more dynamic deployment between traditional premises and the public cloud: Gartner’s 2020 cloud end-user purchasing behavior analysis shows that 76% of respondents said they used more than one cloud provider.

New independent software vendors are entering this evolving landscape by changing the form of managed services to reflect customer needs and provide more experience in specific cloud areas and open source platforms. Ultimately, as cloud services go through this process of decombination and move away from monolithic architecture, cloud strategy efforts will become a balancing act between control and convenience. Businesses need to strategically think about which services to use from major cloud providers and the services that independent cloud providers can provide with the necessary experience.

This article was written by Insights, a custom content developer for the MIT Technology Review. The editorial staff of the MIT Technology Review did not write.

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