The eternal question in the technology space seems to be “what does the future hold?” The trends in our industry have ranged from the introduction of cloud computing and hybrid cloud to the Internet of Things (IoT) and Everything as a Service (XaaS). So, what does the future look like now? There have been rumblings for some time that the future of our industry lives in businesses taking a multi-cloud strategy approach.
Some people tend to lump the multi-cloud strategy into the hybrid-cloud category. While some multi-cloud setups are hybrid, most are set up utilizing various public clouds. That option offers access to an extensive variety of technologies and business models which is on trend, according to the RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud report. The report determined that 85% of enterprises are currently using multiple clouds, and we can expect the popularity of this approach to continue rising.
Hybrid-Cloud Vs Multi-Cloud: Don’t ditch hybrid just yet
Don’t worry; hybrid-cloud is not going away anytime soon, just like on-premise data centers still exist. In fact, the hybrid-cloud market is expected to reach nearly $92 billion by 2021, according to multiple research firms. It’s hard to say if this is where the market will level off because there will always be workloads running on local data centers, for many reasons. Adopting a hybrid-cloud strategy is likely a good plan to carry your organization. At least for the next few years.
Before you know it, the majority of enterprise architectures will be public-cloud. Hybrid-cloud will begin fading as public-cloud asserts its dominance until the next trend comes along. The reasons to change your strategy from hybrid to multiple-clouds will continue to grow. Soon enough, public-cloud will replace hybrid-cloud’s dominance. That is until a new “next big thing” comes along.
The inevitable multi-cloud strategy
Having to maintain legacy apps on-premise will take away resources and budget that would be better spent on innovation. In addition, relying on more than one cloud provider reduces your dependence on a single vendor, allowing you to optimize your costs and by giving you areas to cut if the budget calls for it.
And while there are some legacy applications that IT teams are wary about moving to the cloud, they can’t hold off on it forever. Soon enough, those apps will either become obsolete or too expensive to sustain. This will essentially push those holding out from a multi-cloud strategy toward more flexible and scalable architectures. Besides, soon enough these late adopters will realize that the most remarkable innovations are coming to the public-cloud, not the data center.
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