Navigating Cloud Migrations: Entering the Multi-Cloud Era
Given how widespread it is, you could be forgiven for thinking that everything is in the cloud these days. But according to the latest research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), the average amount of IT infrastructure hosted by a company in the cloud currently hovers around 50%. In fact, only 7% of organizations currently have more than 80% of their infrastructure in the cloud β but at the other end of the spectrum, only 8% of companies have less than 20% of their IT in the cloud.
In short: the cloud is mature, but still far from universal.
And when it comes to future adoption, almost half (42%) of companies are adopting a cloud first policy, while 55% are taking a hybrid approach. Only a small number of organizations (2%) currently keep IT on-premises where possible, so there is plenty of evidence that the cloud is a proven technology today.
In addition, many organizations now use more than one cloud, tailoring the cloud to the workload, rather than the other way around. We’ll look at what this means later, but first let’s look at some of the common benefits and challenges of migrating from on-premises to the cloud.
Multi-Cloud Evangelist at OVHcloud.
The Mature Age of the Cloud: The Benefits
The main benefits of the cloud are well known. According to CIF, IT professionals are adopting the cloud to improve flexibility (32%), increase ease of scale (29%) and realize cost savings (29%). One of the key benefits of the cloud is that it can be tested, launched and shut down in an instant, allowing organizations to use only the resources they need, when they need them.
Furthermore, as many as 81% of organizations believe that the cloud makes their IT infrastructure significantly or slightly more mature than using purely on-premise infrastructure. This is largely for two reasons: First, most cloud providers offer security at scale. They invest in the best and most resilient security, where both physical and digital security is continuously tested and developed. Second, while a larger IT domain means a greater number of endpoints to protect, it also means a more distributed IT environment, making it less likely that a single outage will have a major impact.
However, migrating to the cloud is a difficult journey. In fact, half of IT decision makers say the migration was more complex than expected. Let’s look at some of these challenges.
The challenges of moving to the cloud
The ease of moving to the cloud is a bit like moving: it depends on what you’re moving. Leaving your home to move into your first home is a lot easier than moving a family of four after ten years in the same place. That said, there are some pitfalls common to most migrations.
First, moving to the cloud requires a significant amount of due diligence, which makes the choice of technology partner important. Evaluating the most suitable workloads and applications to migrate to the cloud, taking into account technology lifecycles and organizational needs, is a complex and difficult task.
Businesses must also consider issues such as resiliency, backup and disaster recovery, as well as networking, cybersecurity and automation requirements β all before even choosing a cloud provider. The complexity of cloud migration is leading many end-user IT teams to realize that there is rarely a single cloud that can meet all their needs.
There is also longer term work to consider β for example setting the vision and strategy, governance, setting the roadmap, managing adoption β including training and feedback β as well as monitoring success and review the renewal process later.
Dealing with this complexity is probably one of the most difficult parts of moving to the cloud. Every organization has a different technology domain with its own constraints, policies and stakeholder preferences. In addition, companies in more regulated industries such as healthcare or the public sector will receive guidance and due process on cloud use, including what can be stored or processed where and by whom. This makes the initial preparation and profiling of the company doubly crucial.
And as we said, the cloud can often make an organization more secure, but it’s important to be aware of the security nuance of outsourced servers. For example, by using bare metal, an organization gains full control over the security options, but also the responsibility for them. On the other hand, public cloud often has parts of the security pre-set by the vendor, which can mean less power, but also less responsibility.
Finally, without broadening the scope, most organizations today use more than one cloud.
The multi-cloud era
According to our own research, 80% of UK organizations are currently using more than one cloud or are exploring or moving to a multi-cloud environment β ββand 95% of businesses believe their use of multi-cloud will remain the same or will increase. in the next five years.
In many ways this makes a lot of sense. Different clouds are suitable for different purposes and workloads. But just like with cloud migration, there are some common points to look for when choosing your next cloud, especially if you have multi-cloud in mind:
– Price: Your cloud needs to deliver the right performance at the right price, but beware of vendors offering high initial discounts. These can decrease over the years, leaving you with a lot of infrastructure in a cloud environment that is becoming increasingly expensive.
– Security: Know your data. For example, if your data needs to live in a SecNumCloud environment, find a provider that has been operating one for years.
– Interoperability: If you use connected multi-clouds, they need to work well together. If possible, check out the testimonials of other users doing similar things to you before you move, and consider using open source technologies to facilitate this and any future moves.
– Geographic reach: If all goes well, will your project expand to other regions in the future, and if so, does your chosen cloud provider offer these regions? – Availability: when should your project start and how quickly can your chosen provider actually deploy the kit? If there is a delay, it will delay the project.
AI
No article today would be complete without a mention of AI. It’s particularly worth noting that sometimes your ‘primary’ cloud provider also doesn’t offer cost-effective GPUs, so if anything, AI is driving the growth of multi-cloud. Again, the decision about choosing a provider for AI workloads is nuanced: model training typically requires high-end GPUs, but because the data isn’t actually in production, latency isn’t an issue β so you can deploy them anywhere. However, in production, latency (and therefore locality) will become more important, but you can usually use lower spec GPUs after the intensive model training is complete.
Once a cloud migration is successfully completed and the pitfalls have been overcome, the journey is rarely over. However, this can be a very good thing: moving to the cloud can help organizations explore the benefits of cloud-native technologies down the road. AI, machine learning and harnessing the power of big data can offer significant potential to a new cloud-native organization β so if stakeholders aren’t excited about the simple migration to the cloud, it’s worth taking two steps forward look and think about the future. the corner.
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