An optimal and intelligent cloud? That is the proposal of Cloud Smart, the new paradigm that is imposing itself on organizations that wish to continue earning value from the cloud universe. But the road that brought us here was long and full of complexities.
At first it was the cloud, with its basic premises: controlled costs, unlimited scalability, absolute flexibility, pay-per-use, democratized access to new technologies, agility, business continuity and operational resilience no matter what.
The pandemic, in addition to corroborating this last point, has led to an unprecedented acceleration of migrations to the cloud. Cloud spending by 2025 will, according to market consultant IDC, be US$1.3 trillion (up from just over US$700 billion in 2021).
To keep in mind, COVID-19 forced many companies to migrate compulsively in order to stay operational. It was only after some time of experiencing the value gained that these organizations decided to strengthen their cloud investments.
Quasi-mandatory migration
Taking into account the above, we can say that the idea of Cloud First was consolidated this way: there is no longer any evaluation of whether to migrate to the cloud or not. Companies don’t even think about what should be uploaded to cloud platforms. It is simply decided that the entire business will be based on this technology. Another well-known consulting firm, Gartner, says that by 2025 more than 85% of companies will adopt this strategy and that cloud-native tools will be the only way to fully execute digital strategies. That’s not all: by that year, more than 95% of new workloads will be deployed on native platforms, up from just 30% in 2021.
One of the enablers for this model to become a reality was the concept of multi cloud: the ability of companies to select the cloud architecture that best suits their characteristics, their needs, the performance required or even the industry. Private clouds (resources dedicated exclusively to the organization), and public clouds (infrastructures available to companies and users in general) merged their best features in the hybrid cloud. The original levels of flexibility, workload efficiency, performance and scalability reached a new level.
Long-term protection
In addition, this model protects the business in the long term: unlike what might happen if the entire business operation were concentrated in a single cloud, here there is no risk of growth being constrained by the characteristics of a particular vendor, of certain applications underperforming, or of being «imprisoned» by the whims of a company that may vary pricing conditions or negotiated agreements.
Switching providers, in a multi-cloud model, is a near real-time operation. In the short term, the availability of applications does not depend on the provider suffering some kind of failure or problem.
Today we are facing the next evolutionary step: Cloud Smart. This is the new step that companies need to reach to remain competitive and with a differential in the market in which there is practically no organization that doesn’t have a cloud strategy.
The cloud of the future
Cloud Smart capitalizes on the Cloud First approach and proposes a deeper dive into the world of intelligent technologies, data structures and available architectures to simplify migration between providers and maximize the use of multi-cloud schemes to the point where it is perfectly transparent to the user and to the organization. All this without unnecessary expenses, «just-in-case» contracting or sub-optimal service performance.
The future looks smarter. And the cloud model tends to adapt to that scenario.
Links to the mentioned studies:
https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS48208321
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-11-10-gartner-says-cloud-will-be-the-centerpiece-of-new-digital-experiences