INSIGHT
“Multicloud
has quickly become the standard for modern IT, with 65 per cent of survey respondents already
using two or more public cloud platforms.” Paul Nicholson, Senior Director of Product Marketing, A10 Networks
Managing Multi-cloud Chaos
As the race to the cloud accelerates, both the benefits and the challenges of multi-cloud environments are
becoming ever clearer. Paul Nicholson, Senior Director of Product Marketing, A10 Networks discusses what he
is seeing in the market
There is no question that
multi-cloud deployments
now play a foundational
role in everything from
internal business needs to digital
transformation initiatives — but
it’s also essential for IT to ensure
eective visibility, governance,
security, and control across
both public and private clouds
as multi-cloud deployments
mature into standard IT and
operational realms. Strategies are
desperately needed to address
these challenges.
To gain insights into current
state and future direction of
multi-cloud deployments,
A10 Networks partnered with
the Business Performance
Innovation (BPI) Network for a
global survey of IT and business
executives. e ndings oer
a revealing look at the fastevolving
state of multi-cloud
adoption, management practices,
and platforms that will shape IT
over the coming years
The multicloud
consensus
Multi-cloud has quickly become
the standard for modern IT,
with 65 per cent of survey
respondents already using two
or more public cloud platforms.
And these aren’t just pilot
projects or niche use cases; half
of the companies in the report
have moved at least 30 per cent
of their enterprise applications to
the cloud, and 35 per cent have
migrated more than half.
Today’s public cloud
platforms and private cloud
technologies oer a rich array
of options for organisations
seeking to supplement or
move beyond the constraints
of traditional infrastructure.
Survey respondents report the
desire to leverage this exibility
to address an equally broad
range of priorities and use
cases, including accelerating
digital transformation,
improving compute and cost
eciencies, meeting regulatory
requirements, and increasing
performance, scalability, and
reliability.
Taking a multi-cloud
approach can multiply the
eectiveness of this strategy.
By distributing their cloud
assets, software, applications,
and data across multiple cloud
environments and providers,
organisations can provide the
best t for each use case and
workload—a benet reported
by more than a third of
respondents.
Meeting the challenges of
multicloud
environments
Recognising the potential
benets of multi-cloud
environments is the easy part;
realising them is another story
Many attribute this to the
shortcomings of the vendors
they’re working with. Only 9 per
cent of respondents are extremely
satised with their current
security solutions for multi-cloud
deployments—while four times
as many see a need for signicant
improvements. What kind of
improvements? Top requirements
cited include centralised visibility
and analytics into security and
performance (56 per cent),
automated tools to speed
response times and reduce costs
(54 per cent), and centralized
management (50 per cent).
e IT and business leaders
surveyed cited a need for
centralised authentication (62
per cent), an essential capability
to ensure eective control over
which users, admins, and systems
can access various assets across
the clouds in use. Centralised
security policies (46 per cent),
web application rewalls (40
per cent), and robust DDoS
protection (33 per cent) were also
frequently mentioned, as was the
need for more scalable, highperformance
security solutions.
The multicloud
paradox –
strong results, continued
investment and lack of
perceived success?
While most organisations have
yet to see the full benets of
using multiple clouds, they’re
already seeing promise for their
multi-cloud strategy. Nearly twothirds
of respondents pointed
to the redundancy and disaster
recovery advantages of a multivendor
approach, while roughly
half called out cost optimisation
and performance optimisation.
Results like these are giving
organisations cause to continue
and extend their multi-cloud
strategy. A full 85 per cent of
respondents have advanced their
company’s cloud commitment
over the past two years, including
more than half reporting
signicant progress, and nearly
one-fth moving aggressively
to a cloud-rst strategy. And
this will only increase. A full 84
per cent of the IT and business
leaders surveyed plan to increase
their use of public and private
clouds in the coming two years,
with most either expecting to
add more clouds, or open to the
possibility of doing so.
So, what is the paradox?
While spending and multi-cloud
adoption increase, only 11 per
cent of respondents believe they
have been highly successful
in realising the benets of
multi-cloud computing. is
gure is way too low. While
multi-cloud strategies are new,
they are not that new. is
demonstrates a clear need to
drive cloud operational eciency
to mainstream, and the way to
this is operationalising clouds as
we did data centres. In fact, this
is needed for cloud environments
more than ever.
50 | Comms Business Magazine | March 2020 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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