While all of us were taking virtual calls in our bedrooms or helping kids adjust to distance learning, IT departments around the world were busy jamming six-plus years of cloud migration into a nine-month window.
Banks scrambled to expand mobile offerings, retailers expanded e-commerce strategies, manufacturers reinforced shaky supply chains and healthcare providers accelerated telemedicine deployments. Also, while M&A activity dropped 21% for the first half of 2020 (compared to the same period a year ago), activity spiked in the third quarter. A frenzied period of deal-making resulted in more than $1T in mergers and acquisitions in the third quarter alone — with signs pointing to continued momentum through 2021.
All of this activity — from getting your grandfather comfortable with making mobile deposits to SalesForce buying Tableau for $15.7B — accelerated the expansion of multi-cloud strategies for organizations of all sizes and in every market. According to Gartner, while just 47% of organizations using infrastructure as a service (IaaS) executed on “deliberate” multi-cloud strategies in 2017, more than 75% will do so by the end of 2022. In broader terms, multiple studies show that about 93% of all enterprises — regardless of strategic intent or IaaS deployment — are now engaged in multi-cloud transformations, with a majority of those pursuing hybrid strategies.
Setting the ground for a multi-cloud strategy
Organizations were clearly eager to accelerate things in 2020 simply to survive. They needed to expand their cloud strategies so employees cloud work, customers could buy, partners could connect and supply chains could deliver. There was a new willingness to improvise, experiment and hope the new cloud infrastructure worked. In other words, the idea of a “multi-cloud strategy” seems to be a bit of a misnomer. It sure seems like the volume of improvising and experimenting was far greater than the amount of strategic planning.
Before the pandemic sent IT teams scrambling, carefully planned and executed multi-cloud strategies seemed rare. Two of the biggest drivers of multi-cloud adoption before 2020 were M&A activity and shadow IT. When two organizations came together, it was likely that they were bringing different public and private cloud infrastructures with them. The idea of interrupting operations to consolidate those disparate cloud infrastructures is rarely appealing, both from a productivity and a cost perspective.
Shadow IT probably drove even more multi-cloud activity. In most organizations, individual departments tend to pursue the cloud strategy that best suits their needs. IT is either circumvented when apps and cloud services are chosen — or they are brought in so late that a consolidated multi-cloud strategy isn’t possible. Marketing departments might prefer AWS, while DevOps prefers Google Cloud. But whether it’s the pandemic, M&A activity or shadow IT, in most cases, the path to an organization’s current reality is far too haphazard to call a “multi-cloud strategy.”
Of course, there’s a price to be paid for this. Various surveys point to about half of all CIOs struggling with multi-cloud costs that are higher than expected. In some cases, they’re finding that running in the cloud is even more expensive than their previous on-prem deployments.
Most often, higher-than-expected costs are driven by complexity. There are a number of causes for multi-cloud complexity, but a common one is the result of embracing self-service IT models and IaaS. While these things are not necessarily complex in their design, they can make it difficult to maintain vision and control when deployed without a strong plan. Lack of visibility can also be a product of multiple workloads running in multiple cloud environments. Simply ensuring that invoices from various cloud providers — which often have thousands of line items — are accurate can present serious challenges and ample opportunity for billing mistakes and cost overruns.
Despite these challenges, not pursuing a multi-cloud strategy is not the answer. Before we explore the steps to optimizing a cloud strategy, let’s review why it’s important.
Why is it necessary to have a multi-cloud strategy?
There are multiples reasons why having a multi-cloud strategy is increasingly becoming essential for enterprises across the globe. Here is a quick look at a few of them.
Optimal Environments: Giving your enterprise the flexibility of a multi-cloud approach lets you choose the best cloud hosting provider for each workload or application in your organization. In some cases, latency may be most important, while in others it may be feature sets, service level agreements or cost.
Competitive Pricing: Competition in the past few years has expanded greatly. AWS (32% market share) and Azure (20%) are still giants, but they are getting strong competition from Google Cloud (9%), Alibaba (6%), IBM (6%), SalesForce (3%) and Oracle (2%). A well-designed multi-cloud strategy lets you shop for the best price.
Operational Resilience: A strong multi-cloud strategy can protect critical business applications and data with redundant backup and recovery capabilities. Not being locked into one provider allows you to spread your operations and mitigate your risk. Storage Scalability: We’re generating data in incredible and increasing volumes. More than 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the past 24 months. A multi-cloud strategy gives you room to scale your storage and shop for the best balance of speed, visibility and pricing.
Network Performance: A multi-cloud approach lets you create high-speed, low-latency infrastructures that integrate economically with your legacy systems. You can search for low-latency connections that offer the fastest application responses time and best user experiences.
No Vendor Lock-In: Creating a multi-cloud infrastructure gives you negotiating power. IT as an industry has a history of providers who force customers to accept unfavorable terms because of restrictive contracts or lack of competition. A strong strategy will make use of the ample competition in this market.
So, if you’re like most organizations, you currently manage a multi-cloud infrastructure that has evolved with some planning, but also with a great deal of haphazard influence from shadow IT, mergers, acquisitions and company-wide acts of independence. Mindtree has built an extensive practice for helping organizations of all sizes transition from their current state to a more planned state — which can deliver on the true promise of multi-cloud. Here are some insights from some of our customer successes:
- Match workloads and applications to the best provider: Some cloud providers are known for a wide range of services, others for DevOps tools and others for data processing ana analytics capabilities. By aligning workloads with provider strengths, you can drive optimal outcomes.
- Create and follow a blueprint: Your organization likely had a mostly on-prem infrastructure that worked well for years — or decades. With the right plan, you can replicate the resilience and performance of that trusted infrastructure without interrupting your operations. Each provider offers slightly different standards, service tiers and features. An important consideration for most plans is an application gateway that creates seamless experiences for users across various cloud services.
- Develop Cost Management Processes: Achieving the desired cost benefit of a multi-cloud strategy requires consistent measurement and consolidated tracking across all providers. This includes providing team with visibility to see what they are spending, carefully managing the data storage lifecycle and encouraging container use by DevOps teams.
- Ensuring data protection and privacy: Security controls vary greatly from one cloud provider to another. All offer strong data security and privacy measures, but they’re deployed and managed differently. For example, user authentication is often different from one cloud environment to the next. A strong multi-cloud strategy includes universal processes and a cohesive plan for mitigating risk.
Regardless of how you get there, a multi-cloud infrastructure is the best path forward for almost any organization — and certainly for larger enterprises. Of course, there are challenges, which are mostly related to managing sprawl and getting costs and security in order. But the benefits almost always outweigh the disadvantages.
The complexity of your migration to a multi-cloud should be most in the planning stages. In fact, if you’re on a good path, planning will take longer than deployment. One reason for this is that your CISO or other security team members should spend a lot of time trying to identify security flaws and vulnerabilities in your plan. That takes some time and usually involves multiple iterations. Only after your security team deems your plan “bulletproof” should you move onto the implementation phase.
