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Did you know? 90% of the world’s data today got created just in the last two years. In the digital economy, organizations are trying to manage burgeoning data, while simultaneously trying to extract actionable insights to unlock new business growth. With data emerging as the new catalyst for innovation, organizations are racing against time to transform themselves into data-driven businesses.
In the era of Industry 4.0, organizations can no longer afford to have their data locked up in separate siloes across the hybrid IT estate. As per a recent Forrester research, 73% organizations still have disparate and siloed data strategies in place, and 64% are challenged with a multi-hybrid infrastructure. It’s little surprise therefore that 70% of these organizations attribute process simplification as a high or critical business priority.
Can a multi-cloud strategy help?
As organizations realize the need to break down these siloes and better streamline their business, the public cloud is a good option to consider. However, a ‘one-size fits all’ approach will not work. More and more organizations are now considering a multi-cloud approach, because of the choice for them and their application developers to pick and choose components from multiple cloud providers, using what’s best for their use case. Research validates this trend, with nearly 3 out of 4 organizations expecting to use a multi-cloud model in the next couple of years.
For organizations looking to become more data-driven by using their data as an innovation engine, the capability to be selective is crucial. Because it can help them to move key corporate data closer to vital cloud services, such as high performance compute and new services that enable access to emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and advanced analytics helping them develop new business models.
Time to consider a different approach to cloud?
For some organizations still hesitant to explore the public cloud via a cloud-first or a cloud-only model, there’s one more path to get cloud-ready, while still enjoying the benefits of a public cloud like environment. This ‘Cloud Adjacent Architecture’ offer you the elasticity of the cloud along with the processing power of on-premise IT.
In effect, such a model puts an organization’s data on powerful cloud-ready infrastructure close to the public cloud across a globally interconnected exchange of data centers. This then enables organizations to interconnect securely to the cloud, as well as other business partners, while also directly reducing networking costs as well as latency.
The benefits of such an approach are immense. Enterprises can reduce their data center footprint, take advantage of the scale and variety of modern public cloud services, while still retaining the precision, data ownership and control of an on-premise IT setup.
Furthermore, this ‘Cloud Adjacent Model’ can offer a zero-change architecture - which means, companies need to change nothing. What’s another good aspect is that customers get to choose who manages the data and how, providing total flexibility. This additional flexibility to multi-cloud architectures can help support the push towards digital transformation.
Take smart city initiatives for example, involving a large number of cameras, sensors and the like. The convergence of the digital and physical worlds provides those driving smart city initiatives a unique opportunity to understand better the dynamics of a location on a real-time basis and then use insight to provide value back to residents and businesses via provisioning new or better services, often delivered via an app.
This new approach combines the best of both worlds within a multi-cloud model, potentially eliminating some of the core drawbacks of data complexity, and helping usher in more project rollouts faster - to ultimately make a significant difference to citizens’ lives.
The author is Senior Director & Head - Systems Business, Oracle India
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