In 2015, cloud users leveraged more clouds than ever before. According to the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report, companies using the cloud are averaging the management of 3 public and 3 private clouds. Who would have thought that 6 clouds would be the average? And why 6 and not 2 or 12?
It’s also interesting to note that the report further broke down the types of clouds environments that are run by Enterprises. Enterprises are running applications on 1.5 public and 1.7 private clouds and experimenting with 1.5 public and 1.3 private clouds.
6 Reasons for the Management of 6 Clouds:
- As large public cloud providers become more commoditized, more niche offerings are created that are better suited for specific applications, industries, etc.
- IT professionals with one cloud option are realizing that there are unexpected costs and inefficiencies with having only one cloud service provider.
- Increase in experimenting with different cloud types as businesses spend more money on migrating daily work processes outside of dev ops.
- Workload migration across clouds is easier but not yet seamless.
- There are still major challenges in expertise, cloud security, and compliance for Enterprises.
- Cost management of multiple clouds is difficult to optimize.
Why not less than 6 Clouds?
The use of cloud services is fragmented by department needs. Major departments using the cloud include IT and development, marketing and sales, and HR. Central IT and business decision makers are more involved because technology is moving closer to the business. This means that business advantages of the cloud are more important for aligning the right cloud services for an Enterprise organization.
Many Enterprises may have one business focus but several department and industry needs may change the type of cloud service provider that can align both. In addition, more workloads are moving to the cloud than ever before and more dollars are being spent on technologies that can manage daily work processes.
With the increase in cloud service provider options, dev ops teams are finding that experimenting with different cloud types is beneficial to find better options for building, testing and running specific applications.
Why not more than 6 Clouds?
It’s simply difficult to manage multiple clouds. Many Enterprises have yet to adopt a cloud management platform (CMP) that enables multi-cloud management and seamless workload migration across clouds. CMPs with multiple cloud service provider options will be more beneficial to an organization than trying to leverage a single cloud service provider across an entire organization.
The adoption of CMPs should increase drastically as platform providers continue to develop towards the needs of users and efficiency and ease of use are realized by Enterprises. An Enterprise’s biggest challenge is their lack of resources and cloud expertise – which slows down adoption and usage rates.
Also, security and compliance are still a major challenge to extend the use of cloud across an organization. Lastly, we need to face the fact that cloud costs aren’t as cheap as we all think, and it is difficult to manage costs and optimize a multi-cloud environment without the right management platform.
Why is multi-cloud a good option with the right CMP today?
Reduces risk through redundancy
IT can shut down specific services that were vulnerable to one cloud without shutting down everything
Cloud providers may increase prices and terms
Niche clouds are built to better suite specific business needs
Contact Netrix today to learn more about our cloud computing and cloud storage services.
