Companies prefer hybrid clouds: How are the big players responding?
In general, cloud providers seemed to prefer offering public clouds to their partners. However, that raised plenty of concerns. IT crews had a significant digital infrastructure that could not be easily moved off private data centers, and some workloads need to be kept close to their source. Similarly, depending on their nature, many companies have huge regulatory requirements that are not easy to comply with if their cloud environment is totally public.
This means that 86 percent of companies have at least a quarter of their IT infrastructure in cloud environments, and more than half have somewhere between 50 and 75 percent. 58 percent prefer hybrid cloud, per OpsRamp, and Right Scale.
The situation led to some tension between companies and cloud providers, as they had different views and approaches over it. However, the three big players (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) are changing their views and responding to the companies’ calls. Let’s see how they are dealing with the public’s preference for hybrid clouds.
The new releases
Microsoft first announced Azure Stack in 2015 and, recently, it revealed Arc, a multi-layered cloud to extend Azure services whether it is with Stack, other clouds or border environments. It seems to be exactly what most companies are looking for as it provides hybrid automation for managing apps and data in all clouds.
Arc’s launch seems like a keeper. In a multi-hybrid cloud environment, IT crews have to re-design apps to allow interoperability between clouds (the mentioned report said that on average, every company uses five different clouds). The teams have to address the issue of managing assets, metrics, services, and data coming on-premise and from cloud providers.
This means the biggest challenge IT crews are facing is integrating multi-cloud hybrid data without wasting much time and money. That’s what offerings like Arc seems to be doing.
Although the major players are extending their hybrid offerings, that doesn’t mean they are perfect. It is a somewhat new competition environment which means there is a ton of space to innovate, improve, and grow.
After Microsoft, Google released its hybrid cloud offering: Anthos. They say is a modernization platform for an open application that allows IT crews to actualize, build, and run apps anywhere.
In Conclusion: How can this impact IT ops?
The change of approach from the most important cloud providers in the market is great for companies. Most of them will be able to operate in a hybrid setup.
Products like Anthos and Azure Arc will let companies accelerate their cloud adoption with lesser risk, better integration and workload migration. The hybrid approach allows organizations to use the best part of the products from all providers, reduce costs, and distribute risks. Also, the hybrid approach allows companies to pass from on-premise monitoring to dynamic cloud management solutions.
All this means that the embracement of hybrid clouds is deeply positive for IT ops as it gives them more diverse options to deal with cloud management and data protection.