A Successful Strategy to Harness Hybrid Multi-Cloud Platforms

By Gordon Lam, Vice President, Technology Solutions, NetApp APAC

Gordon Lam, Vice President, Technology Solutions, NetApp APAC

In today’s business IT strategies and within the ever-changing operational competitive landscapes, it is undeniable that cloud technologies are instrumental for rapidly achieving strategic objectives. According to research by Gartner, three out of four organizations will have deployed a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud model by 2020, signalling a shift in the landscape of cloud adoption. This growing share of cloud environments in IT infrastructure spending underscores how IT decision-makers are seeing the importance of leveraging new technologies.

As most organizations in Asia-Pacific utilize more than one cloud provider, technology innovation leaders will need to define and deliver new agendas to best harness the advantages of different cloud platforms, whether it is based on their IT or digital transformation strategies. These new multi-cloud strategies will encompass the elements of a successful hybrid cloud strategy, in which data is generated and gathered across various combinations of on-premise, private and public cloud resources.

Identifying the right strategy to harness such hybrid multi-cloud platforms, IT leaders should first look at the type of objectives they are trying to achieve. Organizations that are implementing an IT-focused agenda are often at the beginning of their cloud journey, and will most likely try to remain functional, alongside new cloud-based technologies and processes. These companies will have an IT team to ensure operations run at the lowest cost, using as little resources they can to focus on maintenance and stay afloat.

Conversely, companies looking towards a transformation agenda view IT as a major strategic differentiator. Businesses like these turn to IT teams to drive rapid innovation, evolve business processes and tackle the competition to get ahead. The IT teams within these organizations tend to face higher expectations than those under the IT agenda and require more flexibility to make and implement decisions in a cloud environment, shifting data when necessary.

Making the jump What we have seen is a change over the past few years, in which a majority of enterprises have made the jump to hybrid cloud environments — many of them regard hybrid cloud as the next step in cloud computing for their organisations.

In today’s business it strategies and within the ever-changing operational competitive landscapes, it is undeniable that cloud technologies are instrumental for rapidly achieving strategic objectives

Leveraging the efficacy of hybrid cloud and honing in on the strengths of cloud providers, these businesses were able to become cloud smart. Today, the dialogue between IT leaders lies more on the spectrum of how they can evolve or incorporate multi-clouds, as opposed to the traditional transition to cloud journey.

A key component that businesses need to look at within their hybrid cloud strategy relates to data management. Enterprises should be able to move data seamlessly across different public and private environments with flexibility and agility. To do so, IT leaders should look at a greater holistic cloud strategy that can guide its teams in adopting the cloud on its own terms and bridge the gaps cloud can create between user expectations and what IT teams can deliver.

However, companies will soon need to evolve their approach towards cloud technologies alongside transformation efforts to stay ahead or out manoeuvre their competition. A recent survey by 451 Research found that around two out of five enterprises in Asia-Pacific are implementing a hybrid cloud without a formal strategy in place. Organisations need to plan for and embrace change, way before it happens or risk their strategy not being realised.

The Next Steps

With Southeast Asia’s digital economy expected to expand over the coming years rapidly, organisations will need to adapt quickly to the needs of their customers and businesses in the region to remain competitive regardless of their market sectors. IT leaders are turning to hybrid multi-cloud environments, where the prowess and unique capabilities of each cloud provider can be combined. Furthermore, many organizations are implementing multi-cloud, and are oblivious to the fact .

For those that are still hesitant towards adopting a new strategy, three major common concerns are; data sovereignty, security and availability of skill sets — proving, even more, the importance for organizations of today to rationalize their multi-cloud usage and develop a strategy to implement hybrid multi-cloud management, and architecture where necessary and harness the right skillset to deliver.

Hybrid multi-cloud environments entail the combination of multiple clouds and offer tools to enable interoperability between the different functionalities of hybrid and multi-cloud solutions. A stand out major benefit of hybrid multi-cloud is that it enables businesses to bring new services to market rapidly bolstering revenue returns faster A hybrid multi-cloud model based on open technologies also allows for greater interoperability, workload portability and management. As the features of different clouds are able to work in tandem, the result is better allocation and use of resources without silos. By employing collaborative cloud platforms to streamline decision-making processes, companies can gain a competitive edge.

In addition, a hybrid multi-cloud would facilitate data innovation, where IT teams are able to maximize the full potential of the resources available to them. With the advancements of new technologies, IT teams can now distribute workloads across several cloud environments and on-premises with greater ease. Ultimately, it is important that IT leaders think about how they can incorporate innovations into their existing IT strategies to take their business offerings to the next level.