Drivers of IT transformation and the role of multi-cloud

Multi-cloud expansion is essential for many organizations that are scripting strategic initiatives for future growth and success. But excitement over the advantages of multi-cloud—including modernization of cloud infrastructure, operations, and applications—needs to be balanced with caution. Managing and operating multiple applications and workloads across multiple clouds can create increased complexity and additional silos if not planned properly.

There are several reasons why large enterprises are moving quickly to a multi-cloud environment, including: 

• Improving business agility and quickly adapt to change. The ability of some (and the struggles of others) to pivot from a 100% on-site workforce to largely remote in response to COVID-19 was a wake-up call for many
• Creating new services faster and growing revenue
• Harnessing behavioral intelligence to personalize consumer experiences, build intimacy, and ensure satisfaction
• Protecting data, applications, and users in the current threat landscape 

Multi-cloud, as part of an IT digital transformation, is necessary for companies to realize (and operationalize on) their strategic imperatives. While each company may differ in the defining and timing of their digital transformation journey, IT decision-makers are clear in their requirements. They want to: 

• Create and deploy new services across a choice of public, private, and edge clouds
• Reduce reliance on a single vendor for public cloud capabilities
• Accelerate interoperability across clouds, applications, workloads, and services 
• Operate in a “cloud smart” fashion with the ability to leverage public cloud applications for specific workloads, such as using Google Cloud BigQuery for data analytics, AWS for mobile apps, and Oracle Cloud for ERP
• Build enterprise sovereignty and control their digital transformation journey
• Manage across the digital and physical worlds seamlessly and skillfully 

Lines of business are eager to capitalize on what can be achieved through digital transformation and the ability to use multiple clouds. A VMware survey found that 73% of large companies are deploying to multi-cloud environments. 

For most, multi-cloud is now deemed critical for success. But IT needs to be clearheaded about the potential pitfalls to avoid in terms of the risk of increased complexity and the potential of creating additional silos in the adoption of multiple clouds. 

“When addressing this growing complexity, many organizations find themselves making decisions that result in trade-offs among developer autonomy, operational complexity, security, and speed of workload migration to public  clouds,” says Dee-Dee Atta, Group Product Marketing Lead, VMware Cloud Universal. “This compromise means you may never get full value from your multi-cloud investments.”

Cloud providers employ their own unique controls and subscription models, which can be confounding to organizations trying to rationalize consumption of compute, network, and storage environments across multiple clouds, traditional and cloud-native applications, and operations.  

VMware provides a unique opportunity to ensure consistent and simplified applications and cloud operations, across multi-cloud IT infrastructure, through VMware Cloud Universal, which provides multi-cloud subscription purchase and consumption flexibility across comprehensive solution choices.