It’s a multi-cloud world. According to IDC, 85 percent of enterprises will be using multiple cloud providers by next year. A separate Veritas survey revealed that nearly three quarters of enterprises already use multiple cloud vendors, with 23% using four or more.
That shouldn’t be too surprising. Each provider offers a slightly different menu of services and prices, and optimizes for different workloads and SLA’s. Organizations have figured out how to mix and match their unique business and application need to the best cloud service out there, and they’re reaping the rewards with even greater agility, flexibility and cost effectiveness than a single provider could offer.
However, these same organizations are realizing there’s a downside. How do you safely move your apps and data around between clouds, for instance? How do you avoid overpaying for storage or an SLA you don’t need for less important workloads? How do you maintain good governance and compliance across such a heterogeneous environment? And how do you do all of that while maintaining your own service levels, perhaps with traditional data centres still in the mix?
These are not trivial questions to address, yet they are critical to any practical multi-cloud strategy.
Where do you start? There’s a common thread running through all these questions.
Ask yourself: what is your business’s most important asset, the one thing you should never outsource or lose control over?
Exactly, YOUR DATA.
In the digital business, without access to accurate, reliable data there is no business. But in the multi-cloud world, your data is everywhere. Trying to manage and protect it across different cloud silos - let alone optimize it and make sure it is compliant with regulations - rapidly becomes a new challenge for IT.
Addressing this problem with multiple point solutions is not scalable. The only practical way forward is to build a foundation for consistent data management and control that spans across all your environments - be that multiple different public clouds, private clouds or on-premises.
Register for our upcoming Global Webcast, and hear directly from Rick Villars IDC, Tad Brockway Microsoft, Mike Palmer and myself Lynn Lucas on how to best architect a multi-cloud strategy for your business. Click here to share the webcast.
Please do raise any questions you may have on this topic before our webcast. Simply use the comment function below.
Lynn
