News

Research Brief Summarizes Trends in Multi-Cloud Deployments

• By David Ramel
• 10/21/2019

Research firm IDC recently published a Cisco-sponsored "infobrief" on cloud trends in 2019 and beyond, specifically to explore the complexities of multicloud applications.

IDC surveyed some 2,200 IT decision-makers to compile the report, titled "Transforming Applications and Multicloud Operations."

"Multicloud deployments are now the norm for enterprise organizations with a mix of public cloud solutions -- SaaS, IaaS and PaaS -- with private cloud environments, either on-premises or with a provide," says the report's executive briefing. "The complexity of the application portfolio climbs substantially as customers right-size workload placement, invest in new technologies and move from ad-hoc designs for cloud to excellence."

Here's a look at some of the report's findings:

• 92 percent of customers have both public and private cloud environments installed
• 88 percent do business with two or more cloud service providers; average is 16
• 69 percent have a “multicloud” strategy (multicloud and hybrid cloud deployments are now the norm for enterprise organizations. Less than 1/3 of customers describe their cloud approach as “single-cloud”)
• 28 percent of all applications are in a public cloud; 40 percent are in customers' own private clouds
• There will be a 50 percent increase in the number of applications supported over next two years
• 47 percent of applications will be built using modular development frameworks such as containers and microservices
• Three major cloud imperatives are: simplify and secure; transform IT operations; and build new digital experiences>
• More than 58 percent of compute and storage resources are at remote/edge or provider datacenters
• Each business application already has 4 to 8 other application dependencies
• 51 percent of respondents expect high application interdependencies in the next two years (up from 21 today today)
• The No. 1 goal over the next five years is “innovate or deliver new products or services,” followed by “invest in research and development” and “deliver digital products (vs. physical products)”
• Organizations prefer to spend less time in troubleshooting problems and outages, system deployment and installation and hardware break/fix/ongoing maintenance, in favor of more time spent in forward/planning/design architecture, business alignment and stakeholder collaboration and security

"The next two years are going to bring momentous change in how IT works to manage all those moving parts," said Cisco exec Kim Compton in a blog post about the report. "We are starting to see a new generation of cloud architects and the rise of cloud centers of excellence where app developers work along IT Ops, security, DevOps, and infrastructure teams to drive design quality by optimizing across different clouds and line of business organizations. This new collaborative approach will result in aligning innovation with speed and agility and the need to ensure governance, compliance, and manage costs."