The next era of cloud computing
A single cloud approach is on the way out, according to an IBM report. Digital Bulletin looks at the key findings and asks three experts what is driving the trend and how technologists should be planning for the future of cloud computing
The age of the single cloud approach is over, according to a new study from IBM. It is the headline takeaway from a global study on cloud transformation carried out by Big Blue.
It shows an extraordinary shift in behaviour from enterprises when it comes to cloud computing, with only 3% of respondents reported using a single private or public cloud in 2021, down from 29% in 2019. IBM says the figures show that hybrid or multicloud cloud is now the dominant IT architecture, and it is hard to disagree.
“In the beginning of their cloud journey, many companies dabbled with several different clouds that created complexity and disconnected piece parts, potentially opening them up to major security threats,” said Howard Boville, Head of IBM Cloud Platform.
“[The] findings reiterate that security, governance and compliance tools must run across multiple clouds and be embedded throughout hybrid cloud architectures from the onset for digital transformations to be successful.”
Indeed, four in five of respondents said workloads being completely portable with no vendor lock-in is important or extremely important to the success of their digital initiatives.
It chimes with one of Microsoft’s key announcements from its Ignite event. The tech giant revealed a number of new technologies that will enable its customers to run software services such as database tools both inside its own data centres, but also in data centres owned by the likes of AWS, Oracle and Google.
Speaking to Reuters, Microsoft’s cloud and AI chief Scott Guthri said the decision has been key in persuading some of its customers to run its services in situations where they cannot use Microsoft data centres.
“The challenge with higher-level services historically has been the concern of ‘lock in’ — what happens if I can only use them in your data centre?” he said. “That freedom of movement causes customers to feel much more comfortable using those services.”
As with just about every enterprise technology trend, the global pandemic has played a central role when it comes to the acceleration of changing infrastructure preferences.
“IBM’s report does suggest that hybrid cloud is the dominant IT architecture as a direct result of the speed in which organisations moved at the beginning of the pandemic. Rather than being strategically orchestrated, the shift was caused by companies having to adapt quickly and completely transform their IT infrastructure,” says Marc Lueck, CISO EMEA at Zscaler.
“Beforehand, many took a monolithic approach to cloud provision, but this has now changed completely. When enterprises were faced with this situation, they quickly realised the benefits of choosing the best platform for particular applications. This meant they needed to relinquish that monolithic strategy and have services running within a matter of weeks, rather than a number of years, which was often the case prior to the pandemic.”
Andrew Oliver, Senior Director of Product Marketing at MariaDB, says there are a number of factors at play that are attracting businesses away from single source cloud and towards more complex infrastructure arrangements.
“There are a few reasons that businesses are pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy,” he says. “There are some industries like manufacturing where purely public cloud deployment is neither desirable nor practical — for example, manufacturing shop floor systems where latency is of the essence.
“These businesses use the public cloud as a disaster recovery site to stay up if there are problems with the local system. The latency of going to the public internet is not desirable for their day-to-day operations.
“Some companies are also hybrid as part of an ‘edge’ strategy. They keep local systems for high-frequency data — even if the final data lives on a DBaaS [Database-as-a-Service]. Others are hybrid because of security policies or regulations, and some are hybrid because they have legacy systems and migrate over time as they refresh applications. There is not one single reason — and reasons also vary by industry.”
The figures strongly suggest that a tipping point has been reached in terms of companies relying on a single public or private cloud, but there are still scenarios where that approach might be most suitable, according to Lueck.
“A single cloud approach allows organisations to know their IT environment, meaning they will have more visibility from a security perspective. One of the most difficult elements of a CISOs role is understanding what has to be protected, so visibility is paramount. Multicloud footprints make that difficult without specific tooling.
“There are scenarios where multicloud might be preferred, but it’s essentially about finding a balance. If an organisation is able to understand the difficulties with management, access, and visibility, then they can assess how resilient the environment needs to be for faster success.”
Other key findings from the IBM report include 64% of respondents saying they viewed industry-related regulatory compliance as an obstacle to the business performance of their cloud environments. The study also revealed that enterprises need to assess how they use the cloud in terms of adoption, velocity, migration, speed, and cost savings opportunity.
Part of the desire for speed and velocity is being fulfilled by running apps and services at the edge by bringing computing closer to original sources of data. It is a trend that is expected to surge in the next few years and an area public cloud service providers are already integrating into their offerings.
“The public cloud vendors have a large number of locations so they provide an instant edge strategy for their customers,” says David Friend, Co-founder, President & CEO of cloud storage startup Wasabi.
“Using a cloud vendor is a much more efficient way to get a large number of points of presence in the field. In addition to the hyperscalers, however, there are CDN [content delivery network] vendors who have large numbers of edge locations that are now offering distributed compute at the edge of the network, in addition to their traditional CDN business.”
Unsurprisingly, Friend says that the preference to migrate infrastructure to clouds will only increase, with organisations still showing a degree of restraint by keeping some workloads on-prem.
“What I think will change, however, is that rather than Microsoft, Amazon, and Google owning nearly the entire pie, there will be more vendors offering a wide range of best-of-breed services that channel partners can assemble into solutions that are superior from a performance or cost perspective than what you can get by running 100% in one of the hyperscalers.
“In this sense the market will evolve more like how the hardware world did. It started with a very few dominant vertically integrated vendors like IBM and evolved to a rich environment of vendors specialising in various pieces of the computing pie.”
Friend concludes that while some technologists seem reluctant to give up on the on-prem environment, they are swimming against an increasingly strong tide.
“CIO should be looking five years ahead to envision what his infrastructure will look like in the future. They should be making plans for how he gets from an all-on-prem infrastructure to a hybrid model, and then ultimately to an all-in-the-cloud model — that’s where the world is headed.”
Oliver says there are actually only a select few businesses that require private infrastructure and that businesses should think about simplifying their systems.
“If you do not have a good reason to run it locally, run it on the public cloud. It’s simpler, more cost effective and there simply is no reason for anyone outside of the technology business to own or lease servers without a regulation or hard latency requirement [i.e. manufacturing],” he says.
“Additionally, preserve your right to leave and negotiate for a better deal — for most companies that means multicloud and avoiding Cloud Service Provider proprietary services. Most importantly, take the opportunity to simplify. If you have a multitude of different databases, try to find one that can handle mixed workloads for all of your everyday applications. Ideally, go to one solution that is versatile rather than 100 point solutions.
“Focus on software that uses a new horizontally scalable architecture. Predicting capacity is really hard. Even if you do it well you have cost overruns and performance underruns, so focus on things that let you change to meet dynamic business needs and avoid complexity.”
