As enterprises brace for the impact of the Covid 19, one technology has risen to its claim of being resilient and scalable. The sudden shift of millions of people to a remote work infrastructure has been made possible only due to the cloud. The cloud is also powering a host of services that have made people productive. From cloud-based collaboration tools (Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, WebEx) to cloud-based telephony tools, almost every service is possible only due to the cloud.
That said, a slew of cloud outages have been caused recently, partly due to the huge increase in consumption both from business related services and consumer facing services. Usage of video collaboration tools and conferencing tools have zoomed. Simultaneously, there has been an increase in consumption of streaming content provided by players such as Netflix and Disney. The increase in outages has made organizations wary of putting all their eggs in one basket. This has led to the adoption of multi-cloud or hybrid cloud models.
The Covid 19 situation has only accelerated this process, as organizations look to diversify their risk by shifting their workloads across multiple clouds. This is corroborated by IDC, which has noted that the public cloud option is not an ideal option for every organization. In a recent press note, IDC's Jyoti Lalchandani, group vice president & regional managing director for the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META) states that the public cloud is not necessarily an appropriate option for all types of workloads. She states that some enterprises are choosing to keep certain workloads on-premises – using an in-house datacenter – or on private clouds, as it helps them achieve better performance, 24/7 availability, enhanced security, and greater compliance with regulations.
IDC predicts that by 2022, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs.
In the current situation, as enterprises look at their internal IT roadmap, they will look to optimize their costs and reduce their risks. In this context, the hybrid cloud option is the best option. Using a mix of on-premise and/or private / public cloud from multiple providers, hybrid multicloud offers organizations freedom and flexibility to run their workload on-permise or cloud and even change cloud providers, if required. Further, a hybrid multicloud approach enables organizations to adopt common management and software development capabilities across the environment.
Key benefits
Some of the key benefits of adopting a hybrid cloud approach include:
In summary, important factors such as cost, compliance and latency issues will accelerate the drive towards hybrid cloud adoption.
Nitin Mishra
Head of Cloud services, NTT Ltd., India
Nitin Mishra is head of Cloud services business in India and also serves as Board Director on some of NTT Ltd’s India companies. The India business is part of NTT Ltd, which is US$11 billion global technology Services arm of the NTT Group. Nitin has almost 25 years of industry experience in the ICT domain and Indian Enterprise market. He has been a key Management member of the erstwhile Netmagic for over 21 years and has played many significant multi-functional roles. Netmagic was acquired by NTT and is now integrated into NTT Ltd.