APAC BLOG
Cloud
Francis Prince Thangasamy
February 26, 2021 | 15 min read
It is widely believed and in fact, affirmed in many scenarios, that the 4th industrial revolution will change the world. The convergence of digital, physical and bio technologies is driving an unrelenting acceleration of human progress. What this means is that Industry 4.0 presents an opportunity for sustainable competitive advantage through next-generation applications such as predictive analytics, smart factories and cities, retail customer self-service and more.
To better differentiate themselves in a busy marketplace, businesses across every industry are harnessing big data in a number of applications – whether that’s to speed up and make more informed decisions, personalize customer experiences, influence IT purchase decisions, or predict consumer behavior, among many other use cases. Suffice to say, there’s data coming at us from everywhere!
Capitalizing on data is one thing, but how certain are you that your infrastructure can support data volumes and application requirements? In a new study, the vast majority of global IT decision makers believe their current infrastructures aren’t ready to harness the power of Industry 4.01. Although many organizations have moved to cloud and adopted cloud-first strategies, four in five IT decision-makers surveyed in the same study, say that a centralized cloud model cannot support their workload demands.
The concept of a multi-cloud environment is simple: distribute workloads across two or more clouds to reduce risk and minimize downtime. That often means signing up for services with cloud providers like Lumen, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or IBM Cloud, either to replace or supplement an organization’s in-house infrastructure services. The use of multi-vendor, hybrid-cloud environments is gaining momentum, as digital businesses in Asia Pacific (APAC) become more accustomed to running applications and workloads across a combination of public and private clouds from multiple providers.
81% of enterprise public cloud users work with multiple providers
According to Gartner’s recent survey, 81% of enterprise public cloud users work with multiple providers1; the study revealed that the decision to move from a central cloud to multi-cloud is based on three major drivers: sourcing, architecture, and governance.
A major benefit of adopting a multi-cloud strategy is avoiding vendor lock-in (sourcing). This allows enterprises to better capitalize on the strengths of different cloud vendors to address their specific business challenges. Having a well-planned multi-cloud strategy also means that it is easier to scale up cloud resources in the future if required.
Different cloud providers fulfil different roles, and it is rare for any single provider to meet all your business needs. Having a robust multi-cloud strategy enables IT managers to consider the performance, security and regulatory requirements of each workload, and select the cloud configuration best suited to the task (architecture).
Moving to multi-cloud can also potentially cause more headaches for IT security teams, when more than one cloud providers is involved. However, with better management and threat defense capabilities, a centralized method for tracking and monitoring applications would also vastly help strengthen an organization’s security posture (governance).
While multi-cloud is fast becoming the preferred choice among enterprises, the operational challenges of working across different environments — and managing such environments — can be overwhelming.
Common barriers to multi-cloud adoption include:
A successful multi-cloud strategy takes careful planning and evaluation of the solutions needed to accommodate new tasks, applications and workloads. IT managers also need to explore how to build and maintain a dynamic, adaptive network architecture to support multi-cloud environments.
Here are several best practices that enterprises should consider when making the transition.
If a business’s multi-cloud solutions aren’t functioning smoothly and cohesively, then the desired efficiencies of cloud computing are wasted. With the predictions that most companies will adopt a multi-cloud approach over the next few years, no one wants to be left behind.
Discover how to prepare your organization for the demands of Industry 4.0 with the right cloud strategy.
Written by
Francis Prince Thangasamy
Francis leads the Product Management, Marketing and Operations function covering Lumen’s comprehensive suite of solutions in the Asia Pacific region.