Multi-Cloud Integration

Speed, flexibility, and innovation require multiple cloud services

As businesses seek new paths to innovation, racing to market with new features and products, cloud services continue to grow in popularity.

According to Gartner, 88% of total compute will be cloud-based by 2020, leaving just 12% on premise. Flexibility remains a key consideration, and reliance upon multiple cloud services is fast becoming the norm. Agile companies differentiate by innovating, cherry picking the best services to support internal and consumer-facing environments.

The challenge in all of this is not finding the right cloud services, but ensuring that they work collectively. Businesses need full visibility over their environments, mitigating shadow IT. Creating simple elements, such as a single dashboard, or single provisioning framework, is very difficult. Managing and maintaining release and regression testing for end-to-end workflows is truly daunting. The complexity and speed make it tough for businesses to cope with this alone.

How do you build a solid foundation for innovation? How do you orchestrate an end-to-end ecosystem of partners and services? How do you ensure the necessary oversight and control, but retain the agility you need for a business advantage? What’s an effective route to a multi-cloud integration?

IT must evolve

Greater complexity and technological advancements are also disrupting the method of delivering services. Advanced technologies for automating and integrating workflows and workloads within traditional IT and cloud compute environments will have an important impact. The need to simplify and manage costs is driving the adoption of new tools, and automation makes sense.

By 2019, more than half of IT infrastructure operation talent in developed countries will work for cloud, outsourcers, and other third-party services. It’s a real shift in the landscape. These operational changes are having a serious impact on people. IDC predicts that 25% of traditional IT operations job titles will be gone by 2019, swept away by software-defined infrastructure and the cloud.

But managing the complexity of choice in the services marketplace will provide a fresh challenge. As the mundane is automated, domain expertise will be vital for businesses interested in unlocking the value of speed, innovation, and differentiation, and it can come from traditional ITO.

Integrate, manage, and orchestrate

Integration is tough, and it grows tougher as the number of cloud services rises. The benefit of proper management services that provide governance and oversight soon becomes clear. The logical end point is an orchestration service capable of evolving at the pace of consumption.

By 2018, almost 70% of all spend relative to infrastructure will be related to digital transformation and tied to supporting third-party platform workplaces.

Simplicity and security are going to be key concerns for every organization. According to an IDG Enterprise survey, 43% of decision-makers are concerned about integration, but 67% are concerned about security. A secure cloud-platform with multi-cloud integration across something such as Citrix workspace cloud can deliver a consistent virtual user experience regardless of access point, and governed by a single service agreement through a service orchestrator. That kind of holistic approach is essential, and will grow more popular as hybrid clouds expand and Service Providers evolve into service aggregators.

The speed of innovation

Rapid technological advancement and disruption is ushering in a new era for IT services. Business are adopting a greater number of digital services, such as mobility, the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, coupled with SaaS-based capabilities, in order to outperform or differentiate their offerings from those of their competitors. It’s an exciting climate full of opportunity.

No wonder that, within three years, businesses will spend 35% of their IT resources on supporting new digital revenues streams, and that 90% of IT projects will be rooted in the principals of experimentation, speed, and quality.

Consider also the proliferation of IoT which exploits data within both Robust and Fast IT environments, drawing on existing data and systems and innovative cloud-based initiatives, to further underpin new digital revenue streams, a market IDC predicts will be worth $1.7 trillion by 2020.

Hybrid-IT will lay the groundwork in terms of managing multi-cloud and SaaS environments alongside on premise IT, and will be the backbone of service quality and expectations, supporting the needs of businesses and enabling them to fully exploit their capabilities against enterprise delivered service levels.

True multi-cloud synergy will open new doors for everyone and furtherance of open source technology with lead to lower cost, fast innovation. More accurate decision-making and quicker adoption of change, will drive artificial evolution allowing us to fail without truly failing with cost, extending our reach as humans, and lifting us to new heights as a society.

By Nicholas Lee