Source: McKinsey
In fact, public cloud services are costing these companies up to six times more than private infrastructure, according to Tim McCallum, Director, Business Value Programs and Strategy at Nutanix. That’s not all, Andreessen Horowitz estimates that the top 50 public companies currently using cloud infrastructure are collectively losing $500 billion of market value due to the cloud’s impact on their margins.
Organizations that realize this – belatedly or otherwise – are increasingly attempting to contain costs by moving workloads back to owned and co-located datacenters, building private clouds, or setting up an agile, hybrid infrastructure.
The trick lies in getting off public cloud platforms when their economic benefits start to diminish. Since enterprise software is usually tightly integrated with the cloud platform’s code, changing the infrastructure is difficult because of factors such as vendor lock-in.
This needs a complete mindset change in the boardroom. Enterprises need to turn erstwhile cost centers that supplied computing resources into innovation centers that are constantly in a state of digital transformation.
Hybrid Multicloud Provides a Workable Solution
“We’re entering an era of Cloud v2 where we’re asking, ‘What is the right architecture? How can I use the cloud in the right ways?’” said Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
A hybrid cloud gives organizations the ability to pivot quickly in the face of changing market conditions and hybrid work environments that have become the norm amidst COVID-related restrictions and easing. No surprise then, that 86% of IT leaders now consider hybrid cloud to be the ideal operating model for their organizations.
As IT leaders take a cloud-smart vs. a cloud-first approach to hybrid multicloud, they’re looking to reduce operational complexity of migrating, extending or bursting applications and data between on-premises and public clouds. The post-COVID cloud-smart way is combining hybrid and multicloud solutions into a single, unified environment using Nutanix Clusters. IDC has predicted that by the end of this year, 9 in 10 organizations will use a hybrid multicloud operating model.
The Cloud Ahead
The one lesson COVID-19 taught the world is that the future is unpredictable. Charles Darwin is believed to have said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
The IT world is no different. The pandemic did not just accelerate cloud migrations in companies, it also elevated IT decision-makers to the boardroom. A lot of organizations are finally starting to recognize that IT is critical to the survival, continuity and growth of their business. The next few years will see business and digital transformation running in parallel, enabled by cloud technology.
As hybrid multicloud environments mature, “industry clouds” are slated to arise as the next big thing in cloud computing. These are industry-specific applications and solutions offered by major public cloud providers in an attempt to gain higher market share in verticals. This reflects the fact that in a post-pandemic world, domain-specific cloud solutions have become even more important.
“Every company is a snowflake,” said Kimball. “The pandemic, the cloud and regulatory pressures will all force them to transform. Enterprises need to get to cloud-like operations quickly to be competitive with smaller companies that are using the cloud entirely.”