From multiple clouds to multi-cloud

Time to strengthen your cloud operating model

The acceleration of cloud service adoption in response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been widely reported. Less well covered has been the concurrent ‘cloudification’ of enterprise datacenters, and the growing use of on-premises clouds. The truth is that IT teams did whatever they needed to in order to move quickly, exploiting any and all relevant options available to them. But as they pulled out all of the stops to achieve incredible things over a short space of time, activity wasn’t always as well coordinated as it could have been. The imperative now is to address any resulting disjoints and inefficiencies, while laying strong foundations for a multi-cloud future. Against this background, the research summarized below highlights that those with a stronger set of cloud operating model capabilities are, on average, already gaining a significant advantage over their mainstream peers.

Recently accelerated cloud adoption is set to continue
When 774 IT leaders were asked about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on their use of cloud platforms and services, 85% said adoption rates had accelerated. As we look forward, growth is set to continue, as cloud is prioritized for new workloads and legacy applications are migrated.

The next big shift is from multiple clouds to multi-cloud
Rapid response to the pandemic aggravated the problem of piecemeal cloud adoption that had already been building. As a result, many are now sitting on diverse cloud estates that are hard and inefficient to manage. The imperative now is to shift to a more coherent ‘multi-cloud’ approach.

But readiness for multi-cloud varies considerably
Success with multi-cloud requires a joined up approach that considers financial, application, and people/skills requirements, as well as process and technology. In effect, you need what some call a ‘cloud operating model’, but fewer than one in ten IT teams claim to have what’s necessary in place.

Those who have made progress are reaping the rewards
A group of ‘multi-cloud leaders’ – the top 25% of our study sample based on a range of multi-cloud readiness indicators – are convincingly outperforming their mainstream peers in areas such as visibility, efficiency, risk management and the unlocking of business advantage from their cloud investments.

Moving forward with confidence
Technology is key, and thinking in terms of a multi-cloud control plane is useful here. Given the multi-faceted nature of multi-cloud, however, an inclusive approach to defining requirements is also necessary that deals with the needs and wants of business people, developers and application teams.

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Dale Vile

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Dale is a co-founder of Freeform Dynamics, and today runs the company. As part of this, he oversees the organisation’s industry coverage and research agenda, which tracks technology trends and developments, along with IT-related buying behaviour among mainstream enterprises, SMBs and public sector organisations.