“Public cloud is not the enemy, yet being wholly locked into it is,” says Aaron White, Regional Director, Middle East at Nutanix. He argues that organisations that proactively develop and implement multicloud strategies are better able to satisfy business requirements.
Ironically, even though every company today must become a technology company, the digital revolution is not being led by the IT department. People and functions within companies looking for that insight, flexibility, scalability and freedom went to the public cloud looking for answers. At a time when IT was needed most, IT was being left behind.
While users benefit from consumer-like applications that enable them to better manage the customer experience, IT teams have to deal with the usability, security and governance challenges of decentralised systems. Not to mention the cost. Public cloud is the new lock in. Lock in to unknown costs. Lock in to unused capacity. Lock in to data and application mobility.
This has left IT staff focused on tactical management, reactive problem solving and blind discovery, versus thinking about customer experience like the rest of the organisation. Simply put, IT is losing relevance and influence at a time when no technology transition has ever been bigger.
The antidote to public cloud lock-in is the freedom to easily move between clouds. It includes knowing the costs, the ability to choose the right location for the right data, and the peace of mind that security and governance are not an afterthought. It is about blurring the lines between public and private, between renting and owning. Because it’s not all about technology. It’s about what the technology enables.
At the heart of freedom is knowledge. There is tremendous value in using knowledge to empower IT and reclaim control over a new definition of cloud infrastructure. The infrastructure is a stop on the journey, not a destination in and of itself. The ability to choose the right workload on the right platform with the right cost is really what everyone was looking for in the first place.
Public cloud is not the enemy, yet being wholly locked into it is. IT wants the power to make informed decisions, and to re-take its influence and control of IT decisions and spending.
IDC’s research a couple of years ago commissioned by Nutanix shows that organisations that proactively develop and implement multicloud strategies are better able to satisfy business requirements, adhere to compliance and business risk management protocols, and optimise the cost and performance of business applications.
Leaving individual groups to create their own strategies often results in the organisation spending more money than it needs to and running the risk of compromising important data.
Organisations interviewed by IDC agreed on many of the key steps for achieving multicloud success, including:
- Define and implement workload placement policies specific to different classes of clouds
- Collaborate with LOB and developer teams to identify current and emerging requirements and SLAs
- Leverage software-defined infrastructure and automation wherever possible. Invest in unified multicloud management solutions including a common service catalogue
- Plan for an evolutionary, multiyear journey that matches the rate at which application architectures and development environments evolve
The real solution is about making the clouds themselves invisible. It’s about hyperconverging the cloud. It’s about a hybrid cloud environment with a seamless experience between public and private clouds so that the ‘where’ becomes secondary to the ‘how.’ How can we enable our company to scale? How can we deliver new applications? How can we control costs? How can we get visibility into our entire infrastructure? How can we make better, more informed decisions?
Nutanix puts the reins back in the hands of IT. Giving IT organisations freedom to focus on the customer experience. Empowering businesses to be agile and build future-forward hybrid cloud infrastructure that is invisible to the organisation, but makes the IT team visible. Not just visible – empowered and relevant.
Click below to share this article