Can multicloud be simplified to the point where anything’s possible?

The future is multicloud, and that future is now

Today, multicloud is the new reality – and it will be so tomorrow. We don’t believe it’s true that all organizations are on a journey to deploy workloads to a single hyperscaler – and the research supports that view. As many as 76% of cloud buyers now use multiple cloud providers¹. More than half of organizations are planning hybrid cloud deployments between private and public cloud²; 48% plan to increase their cloud spending; and 66% want to improve their cloud security³ this year.

Multicloud is the cloud market from now on. But your journey isn’t likely to be linear. To set yourself up for success, expect a continuous cycle of transformation and optimization, delivering incremental improvements and increased value with each step.

Keeping cloud simple is a complex matter

Most organizations understand they must overcome some challenges in adopting cloud, and those challenges are multiplied with multiple clouds.

This is never simple, whether it’s managing multiple cloud partners; creating secure, consistent environments across managed public cloud, on-premises and private cloud platforms; or juggling the needs of traditional and cloud-native applications.

Along with increased complexity comes increased cybercrime vulnerability. Your business growth can also slow down to a snail’s pace when governance, risk and compliance measures become increasingly onerous. Given that most cloud vendors are seeking some form of lock-in agreement, managing multicloud landscapes can be costly, too. Even getting visibility of your entire estate doesn’t come cheap.

Add to this the upskilling of your organization to manage two of the major public-cloud operators and a private cloud, for example, and suddenly your investment in people, processes and certifications becomes massive. It’s no mystery why as many as 70% of businesses rely on managed cloud services providers like us to help them keep things simpler⁴.

Lawter is a Belgian chemicals manufacturer and a longstanding client of ours. Initially, they moved to us from an incumbent supplier to manage their SAP estate on top of a private cloud. We’re now moving those same workloads from private cloud onto Azure, all while delivering a consistent managed service for their SAP Basis environment. We’re giving them full flexibility to choose the flavour of multicloud they need, but with the consistency and simplicity of our managed services.

We’ve helped Belgian chemicals manufacturer Lawter move their SAP workloads from a private cloud to Azure

Your employees are your secret sauce

All cloud challenges are hard to solve without skilled employees. And unless you have an enormous IT budget, you’re unlikely to have a deep bench. All of this slows your pace of innovation because your staff are focused elsewhere. Getting new services to market requires fast development – which is one of the reasons why cloud spending is no longer just the domain of the CIO. It’s not only about cost savings for the lines of business, but also about using cloud services to invest and innovate.

Another of our clients, Henkel, a chemicals manufacturer, was driven by the need to simplify a complex environment of multiple hybrid and on-premises contact centers into a single, cloud-based solution. Following our successfully orchestrated, remote migration during COVID-19, the cloud-based contact-center solution now gives them the flexibility to effectively manage their costs while introducing digital channels and operational enhancements that their customers and service teams were awaiting.

Everything’s simple, anything’s possible?

Multicloud as a service is about realizing the art of the possible. Because you often use more than one cloud provider, it should make it simpler to manage complexity. But it should also give you cloud multivision so you can have your eyes and ears everywhere across your IT estate in an instant, combined with the intelligence and insight that modern technologies like AI and predictive analytics deliver to put you in control.

And when it comes to innovation, you’ll want to take the brakes off, which means you need to optimize your application workloads through application modernization and hosting initiatives aimed at freeing up your employees. With multicloud, innovation is well within your reach.

Read more about Multicloud as a Service.

1. Forecast Analysis: Cloud Consulting and Implementation Services, Worldwide, July 2021
2. Forecast Analysis: Cloud Consulting and Implementation Services, Worldwide, July 2021
3. Gartner, Market Impact: Cloud Shift — 2022 Through 2025, Jan 2022
4. 451 Research: 2021 Cloud, Hosting & Managed Services, Vendor Evaluations