By Fred Mitchell – Enterprises are increasingly customising their cloud infrastructures to readily meet business requirements. It is also this move that has seen multi-cloud emerging as one of the top technology trends for 2023.
As organisations continue to transition their networking and IT infrastructures to cloud, it is becoming harder to ignore the opportunities and benefits that come with multi-cloud environments.
For one, a multi-cloud approach provides business with the flexibility to manage and protect data across different environments – private and public. Maintaining this freedom, choice, control, and agility is crucial for future growth as well as meeting regulatory and statutory requirements.
The move towards multi-cloud is driven by several requirements and resultant benefits:
* Flexible – being locked into a single cloud vendor, or a single type of cloud infrastructure does not always provided flexibility needed to control costs, maintain control over information and the ability to evolve as more cloud operations become available.
* Cost-effective – it provides enterprises with the freedom to select the best products and services for their business needs.
* From technology to business – instead of reinventing the wheel each time businesses create their own cloud, there is a growing awareness of the value of sharing key components of multi-cloud infrastructures.
Key to this business-driven discussion is the acceptance and evolution of the idea some call industry cloud platforms or vertical industry clouds. These are multi-cloud infrastructures with built-in, modular functionality tailored to a specific vertical industry.
Verticals are leading the charge
We’re seeing vertical industries such as banking, healthcare, telco, and manufacturing leading the multi-cloud movement. It allows these sectors to share an agile platform already supported by a portfolio of baked-in, industry-specific, pre-packaged business capabilities directly relevant for their individual industries.
These modular components can then be easily customised or swapped in-or-out to fit an organisation’s business operations or needs.
Furthermore, adopting a business or industry multi-cloud model will also speed the transition to cloud for many organisations.
A vertical industry multi-cloud will essence contain built-in yet customisable capabilities a top CRM provider or HR software provider offer their customers. However, it goes far beyond any single vertical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.
Only multi-cloud infrastructures offer this kind of industry-specific or vertical cloud platform adaptability. Multi-cloud allows enterprises to make the leap from familiar cloud services to creating new cloud platforms with the agility to far more easily and quickly be adapted to new business opportunities, changing business circumstances, or technology innovations.
Industry-model, multi-cloud infrastructures offer many enterprises with the best solution for a decentralised networking environment. The benefits of these industry-specific clouds include:
* Adaptability;
* Business functionality; and
* Innovation.
Multi-cloud is the future of enterprise IT; it delivers differentiated services at scale while remaining secure and compliant with regulatory frameworks around the globe.
Fred Mitchell is the software division head at Drive Control Corporation (DCC)