Cloud services offer increasingly momentous reliability for enterprises across all industries. The main purpose of creating a cloud-first strategy is to move all or most of an organization’s infrastructure into cloud-computing platforms to gain agility, lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and increase the manageability of their production environments. When developing a cloud-first strategy, organizations should determine which cloud type serves their organization best. In this article, we’re taking a look at the latest cloud-first strategy trends so you can be better prepared to implement cloud services into your organization to enable operational efficiencies.
1. Public Cloud Popularity is Growing
Public clouds like AWS and GCP are great ways to manage enterprise infrastructure while keeping costs low and boosting flexibility. According to an Accenture study, moving areas of your organization to the public cloud can reduce your TCO by as much as 40%. Additionally, the public cloud provides agility to increase operational efficiency, delivery, and data management. With all these benefits, it’s no surprise that Gartner forecasts worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services to grow 23.1% in 2021 to a total of $332.3 billion.
Due to this surge in growth, there is increasing concern that public cloud providers might try to create a competitive edge by requiring their customers to commit to only using their services. This will cause vendor lock-in, preventing interoperability among cloud types. If this were to happen, we can expect more organizations to convert to private clouds as they would gain greater control over their processes.
Additionally, in 2021, it seems public cloud providers will transfer parts of their workloads to edge platforms. Frost & Sullivan estimates that by 2022, approximately 90% of industrial enterprises will utilize edge computing to improve response time and save bandwidth. Innovations like this will continue to make the public cloud an attractive option for all organizations.
2. Skills Needed for Complex Private Clouds Will Become Mainstream
During the pandemic, public clouds made it simple for organizations to navigate changing workplace dynamics. Private clouds, on the other hand, are time-consuming to adopt and require skilled staff to manage the infrastructure. But as businesses grow out of the initial shock of the pandemic and the skills needed to manage private clouds become more mainstream, experts predict the use of private clouds is likely to increase.
According to Dell Technologies, private clouds currently account for 40% of cloud spending. However, we can expect enterprises to spend more on private than public clouds approximately two years from now. Especially when the top driving factors of adopting on-prem private clouds are quicker performance, mitigating risk, and continuous compliance.
However, when creating a cloud-first strategy, it’s important to note that you don’t have to choose between private and public clouds. Let’s look into multi and hybrid clouds next.
3. Enterprises Continue to Embrace Multi Clouds
Implementing a cloud-first strategy with both private and public clouds is an example of a multi-cloud strategy. Multi clouds use Kubernetes clusters to avoid vendor lock-in which also keeps an organization’s data secure even if one of the vendors gets hacked. This is why it’s not at all surprising that 92% of enterprises currently have a multi-cloud strategy. In fact, 40% of respondents from IDG’s 8th Cloud Computing Survey say they prefer using multi-clouds to improve disaster recovery and business continuity.
Multi-cloud-first strategies provide enterprises with autonomy over their cloud processes. For instance, business leaders can choose to use multiple private clouds, multiple public clouds, or a mix of both cloud types. This enables enterprises to decide which applications run in certain cloud environments, which types of data get stored in private/public clouds, and how each of their clouds is secured.
Keep in mind, that securing multi-clouds is notably more difficult than with a single cloud provider. Having multiple clouds creates a larger attack surface which can increase the possibility of a security breach. To avoid cybersecurity risks, it’s best to routinely manage encryption keys, SSL/TLS encryption, and identity and access controls.
4. Hybrid Clouds Will Soon Generate $100 Billion
Similar to multi-clouds, hybrid clouds offer advantages over both private and public clouds. Over the last few years, companies have grown to realize that hybrid clouds enable them to have greater control over what is running and where it’s running from. In 2018, the hybrid cloud industry had a value of $44.6 billion. That number is expected to grow to almost $100 billion by 2023 with an estimated 17% growth rate. Ultimately, hybrid cloud strategies allow non-critical activities to occur in a public cloud, while sensitive data and activities occur in a private cloud. This keeps your most sensitive data secure in a private cloud while lowering the cost and complexity of managing less sensitive data in a public cloud.
However, Hybrid clouds have some drawbacks as well such as lower performance and data redundancy. For example, hybrid cloud environments move data between data centres over the internet causing a slower speed of transference. Additionally, hybrid cloud users face data redundancy issues — like not being able to mirror data among different clouds — that decrease data availability. Essentially, it’s up to business leaders to assess and determine which cloud-first strategy is best for your organization.
Final Thoughts
Over 800 global IT professionals ranked “optimizing existing cloud resources for performance and cost” as their top priority for 2021, in a recent survey by Turbonomic. It’s critical for organizations to assess their needs for certain cloud types, plan for, and develop a cloud-first strategy to modernize their business infrastructure. Gaining an understanding of recent cloud-first strategy trends enables organizations to better protect and manage their data all while improving operational efficiencies.
Get in touch with our consultants to learn more about how to effectively create a cloud-first strategy in your organization.
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