Accomplishing digital transformation success with multicloud.

Digital transformation has become a new phenomenon in the corporate scenario. Regardless of size and type, every organization across all industries is making leaps and bounds towards digital, leveraging advanced technologies, such as AI, machine learning, robotics and the cloud. Though adapting to this digitally-empowered world presents significant advantages and economic gains, businesses must consider the substantial challenges technologies bring.

For many years, enterprises' IT leaders have been pursuing cloud computing as a part of their broader digital transformation strategies. Specifically, they are exploring the mulitcloud approach to bring together data from various sources and apply it in new ways. As decision-makers are always in search of a platform that offers flexibility and ease of migration for their workloads across the cloud infrastructure, multicloud seems to be an effective gateway to meet businesses' digital transformation needs.

The ever-growing prevalence of multicloud adoption across different businesses now has spawned a new term, polynimbus strategy. While some considered it the next phase of multicloud approach, it is a multicloud infrastructure management tool, designed to augment work efficiency with many separate cloud environments. Owing to the very nature of a polynimbus strategy, there is no simple reference architecture. Enterprises may use different providers for IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS or they may balance their IaaS across multiple cloud environments for resilience and performance.

Mutlicloud for Digital Transformation

Undeniably, to keep up with the rapidly changing environment, enterprises need to adapt their business models to meet customers' needs and preferences. The ongoing crisis induced by COVID-19 has made this an urgency, forcing business leaders to make the transition to digital. As per IDC predictions, by 2023 digital transformation will account for over half of global ICT spending. This means that enterprises will invest more in digital transformation than in all other ICT initiatives combined. To the extent, a multicloud strategy is the essential first step of companies' digital endeavor.

But before diving into this approach, businesses must look at their challenges and avoid them.

Data Governance and Compliance

Multiple clouds and data centers in different centers of the world can deliver greater flexibility and compliance. However, understanding where the data resides physically might be challenging, especially for small and mid-size businesses. Multiple compliance requirements like HIPAA, GDPR and others need to be met regardless of where the data resides also make data governance critical.

Multiple Vendors Tools

Since there are a large number of cloud vendors out there, utilizing cloud services from multiple vendors requires much consideration. According to the Interop ITX 2018 State of the Cloud report, 37 percent of respondents said that the public cloud vendors provide the monitoring services they use. However, there is a problem that these monitoring tools are not designed to deliver a consolidated view across different cloud providers or environments.

Security

Each new technology brings itself a set of challenges, and so does multicloud, too. It is an undeniable fact that security within the cloud must be the responsibility of the vendor. But it is also an end-user's accountability to take the necessary security measures. Thus, to get the most out of the multicloud environment, businesses must address the challenges represented by unique sites, migration of apps, and other security challenges.

Moving ahead to figuring out how to orchestrate a multicloud environment, enterprises need to reconsider how they can manage the swelling complexity that multicloud will create before they get there. It benefits to some organizations by avoiding vendor lock-in. Besides, it makes it easier to transfer workloads or data between different cloud environments, providing cost-saving benefits and performance optimization opportunities.