Cloud, therefore multi-cloud is the future
Why enterprises must embrace cloud at the earliest to stay ahead of the curve.
Human beings have been tool makers from times immemorial. This capacity sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom and has been the single biggest reason why we have come to dominate the planet. Steve Jobs once famously observed, “The computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our mind.” While Jobs was referring to the personal computer, computing, in general, has contributed to our success as a species in more than one way.
Advances in computing have enabled successive industrial revolutions. For example, electronics and information technology powered the third industrial revolution to automate production. Computing advances undoubtedly power the fourth industrial revolution that we are now witnessing. In this digital age, we are creating new products and services at the intersection of the physical, biological, and technological spheres. So it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that computing will hold its place at the centre of the stage and continue to be a significant driver of innovation.
Here we will look at five reasons why businesses must move to adopt it early.
1. Creating Digital Experiences
Industry analysts predict that by 2022, the future revenue growth of enterprises will significantly depend on their ability to put out digital offerings and the operational maturity that they can develop around those offerings. Data, user-centricity and mobility of experience set digital products apart from their predecessors.
Modern software engineering processes, tools, and distributed systems technologies are essential in creating these digital products. For example, a modern software platform would utilize one or more of the following:
Microservice / Event-Driven Architectures.
Streaming data platforms such as Kafka.
Container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes.
Long-term data storage systems such as data lakes.
Data analytics systems such as Apache Spark.
GPU / TPU based compute clusters to run large scale machine learning workloads are the tools of the trade for building digital offerings.
These are large-scale distributed systems. Self-provisioning these platforms and managing their availability is nontrivial. Cloud providers offer these services for a fraction of what it usually takes to procure and self-manage these systems. Moreover, vendors of the commercial versions of these platforms have tightly integrated their offerings with the cloud, and on-premises are not usually well supported.
2. Cloud is cost-effective in the long run
The short term costs of adopting cloud can be high. The reason is that organizations must manage the existing infrastructure setup while bootstrapping cloud. Depending on the scale of cloud adoption, the cost can run into tens of millions of dollars or more.
However, as organizations continue to make those investments and as the transformation happens, there is an inflexion point at which the organization does not have to simultaneously manage on-premises and cloud infrastructure. While this does lead to cost rationalization, this may not be enough to be cost-effective.
The real cost-effectiveness of cloud comes from automation. Suppose organizations can adopt cloud in a manner in which the incremental cost of productionizing a new software service is low. It effectively helps pay off the initial investments made. This operations model, over the long run, will lead to cost-effectiveness. The automation toolset available in the cloud makes such an operations model possible. Therefore, it is vital for enterprises to realize that cost optimization in the cloud has a lot to do with developing IT operations maturity than trying to save costs on infrastructure pricing.
3. Cloud, therefore multi-cloud
As enterprises begin to offer digital services, they acquire and process customer data in massive quantities. There are real risks of data leaks. There is bound to be a slew of maintenance jobs to patch and secure against potential security vulnerabilities. And periodic audit reporting requirements to address.
Governments worldwide are realizing the importance of regulation around data privacy and security. GDPR in the EU is a case in point. Banking regulators in the EU are asking for a multi-cloud strategy of major European banks as part of their audits. Existing US regulatory frameworks such as HIPPA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001 etc., are quickly adapting to the cloud-first world. All major cloud providers offer services that are compliant with the regulatory requirements. They offer a knowledge base on top to help customers meet the additional needs that the service providers cannot meet without the knowledge of customer context. The reporting landscape is fast evolving, and soon regulators will demand real-time audit reports. Therefore, it is prudent to invest in a multi-cloud strategy to prepare for any regulatory challenges that might show up in the future.
The recent disenfranchisement of Parler by AWS has rung alarm bells, albeit in hushed tones across the industry. This act by a major cloud provider highlights the vendor risk that a single cloud provider strategy might pose. Thus, once a decision to go to the cloud is made, multi-cloud is inevitable.
4. It is the happening place for technology innovation
Cloud is not just a novel data centre. It is where businesses, independent software vendors, the IT community at large intersect. The SaaS market in 2015 was $14 Bn in size. By 2022, it is poised to grow to $125 Bn. In 2013 there were ~90K ISVs. This number is expected to grow to a million and beyond early in this decade. The ISVs, the SaaS vendors are all developing their products in the cloud and for the cloud. Many ISVs do not have an on-premises equivalent of their offering.
These network effects in themselves are propelling cloud computing to more than just infrastructure. Enterprises would be well served taking cloud adoption seriously. Creating digital experiences is much easier in the cloud, given the available toolset and the pace of maturity.
5. Talent mindset is now cloud-first
Cloud literacy is now part of all undergraduate and graduate computer science curricula worldwide. On LinkedIn and elsewhere, engineers wear cloud certification accomplishments as a badge of honour. Across the entire spectrum of IT vocations, engineers aspire to work on areas that involve the cloud in some form or the other. As the rest of the industry transforms, it is clear that over time the number of people who are skilled in running affairs on-premises will be in short supply and bringing them onboard would become costly.