The acceleration of digital transformation initiatives has driven the adoption of cloud computing. This has led organizations to significantly increase their cloud spending. In fact, as per a 2022 report from Gartner, titled, “Market Impact: Cloud Shift – 2022 Through 2025,” over fifty percent of Enterprise IT spending in key market segments will shift to cloud in 2025.
While it shows that CIOs have a significant investment and resources at their disposal to pivot towards the cloud, given the current IT environment, they also need to be flexible with it. Most organizations that migrated to the cloud are not fully locked-in. The way technology is evolving, they have the opportunity in hand to spend the money to change platforms and providers.
CIOs should begin to step up their game for fluid architecture as vendor lock-in or not being able to move from data center to cloud can hold organizations back from pursuing their intention. They should be flexible enough to evaluate the right path.
Since every organization is different, their cloud solutions will be different. However, defining the right cloud strategy is the only way for CIOs to maximize their cloud capabilities. Mono-, multi-, and hybrid cloud strategies are three scenarios where CIOs can choose the suitable solution.
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Here are the pros and cons of and when it makes sense for organizations to take select each approach:
Mono-cloud: the first step
When cloud computing first emerged, many organizations fully committed their resources to it. While it did help organizations to set up infrastructure, it is not sufficient to operate in the long run.
The past couple of years has shown CIOs that mono-cloud setup has many inefficiencies and drawbacks. The probability of one organization meeting all the needs of an organization is very slim. There are specific workloads as well as applications efficiently operating on certain platforms. But, when incorporated with the cloud, the options become limited. It does not provide organizations with the flexibility to respond alongside emerging capabilities and innovations.
Organizations that are at the very beginning of their cloud journey can reap the benefits of a mono-cloud strategy. However, to succeed with their overall cloud strategy, they should start developing an architecture that is flexible enough to take on more cloud platforms in the future.
Multi–cloud: determining which platforms work best with which tools
Using a multi-cloud approach, organizations can avoid vendor lock-in as well as capitalize on the latest solutions. This has led many organizations to use multiple cloud platforms.
Multi-cloud strategies provide organizations with the flexibility to assess their options. Most organizations today recognize that certain tools are more productive and practical within one cloud platform, while some workloads will add more value in another. However, This depends on the specific environment, overall goals as well as technology stacks of the organization.
Hybrid cloud: the logical approach for many organizations
While it is rare to find that organizations today are not capitalizing on the cloud, many organizations are still going to have certain workloads in a data center. Restructuring an entire product portfolio to become fully cloud-based is a challenging prospect. It often consumes time that makes a hybrid-cloud approach the logical step.
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Fully shifting to a cloud environment is often a long-term goal for many organizations. In the meantime, with containerization as well as orchestration, they have a viable hybrid option to gain similar levels of flexibility as well as performance without having to shift their workloads to the cloud.
Organizations should identify ways that will help them to effectively navigate the hybrid ecosystem leveraging tools and technologies as well as platforms that make their journey to the cloud seamless.
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Vishal Muktewar is a Senior Correspondent at On Dot Media. He reports news that focuses on the latest trends and innovations happening in the B2B industry. An IT engineer by profession, Vishal has worked at Insights Success before joining Ondot. His love for stories has driven him to take up a career in enterprise journalism. He effectively uses his knowledge of technology and flair for writing, for crafting features, articles and interactions for technology enterprise media platforms.
