By: Matt Pancino, Director, Industry Solutions Practice, APAC at Google shylendrahoode / Getty Images
A multicloud architecture can deliver a competitive edge for businesses
How can businesses position themselves to access the best products and capabilities to deliver transformation and help them succeed during a period of rapid change?
For many businesses, the answer is a multicloud strategy that extends the capacity and capabilities of IT without up-front capex investments, and supports incremental modernization of applications and processes as resources permit.
Take a considered approach
A genuine multicloud strategy does not entail taking an ad-hoc approach to engaging cloud providers and Software as a Service products.
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In our 2020 Enterprise Technology Predictions post, we said that organizations would slow down experimentation this year and begin to operationalize their digital transformation proof-of-concepts. We also said that, based on spending data, cybersecurity companies such as CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. and Okta Inc. were poised to rise above the rest in 2020 along with an accelerated pace of cloud migrations. And we said the S&P 500 would surpass 3700 in 2020.
Little did we know that a pandemic would make these predictions a virtual lock. And of course, COVID-19 blew us out of the water in some others, such as our prediction that information technology spend would increase 4% in 2020, when in reality we have it dropping by 4% to 5%. We made a number of other calls and did pretty well – but we’ll let you review last year’s predictions at your leisure to see how we did.
Why Hybrid Cloud Is Central to the Colocation Industry’s Future As public clouds grow more sophisticated, it becomes harder and harder for data center providers to build compelling offerings by selling rack space.
It s no secret that colocation providers have for years been facing a critical challenge from public clouds. As public cloud platforms like Azure and AWS grow ever more sophisticated (not to mention cheaper), it becomes harder and harder for data center providers to build compelling offerings by selling rack space.
A key to meeting this challenge is for colo companies to add more value around hybrid cloud. By deploying or supporting hybrid clouds built with infrastructure that runs inside their data centers, colo providers can offer more than just real estate. Indeed, if they want to compete with the public cloud over the long term, they have to embrace solutions that cater to hybrid cloud use cases, even if those use cases involve customers leveraging public cl
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Operating your business on the public cloud means that you re sharing responsibility with the cloud IaaS provider to keep your uptime, well, up. Typically cloud providers will provide tools, such as fail-over zones and VM shadows, to help you run services resiliently. But those are tools you have to wield properly for optimal effect. For some services, like file server backup and disaster recovery, the path of best practices is pretty well-paved with existing solutions. However, running end-user computing – one of your most mission-critical workloads - with high resiliency in the public cloud has important considerations.
What’s keeping CIOs up at night?