The central role of a multi-cloud approach when future-proofing today’s dynamic enterprises

As we closed out 2022 and began 2023, VMware’s Research and Insights organization interviewed more than 450 technology executives to get their candid views on the topics that present enterprises with the greatest opportunities and challenges. The resulting report revealed a technology landscape marked by excessive pressure to deliver IT value in uncertain times.

The findings also provided insightful observations on the transformative impact of multi-cloud deployments and the important role they play in CIOs’ efforts to future-proof their organizations.

Prudence and a keen focus on IT investments that deliver a demonstrable impact on the business are central themes today: 90% of respondents noted that inflation and rising interest rates are top-of-mind in every budget discussion. Just as importantly, 93% reported that delivering customer value is more important than ever in order to hit revenue goals.

While customer value is influenced by many things; the customer experience is always crucial, as are the applications that define it. That fact was immediately apparent in a survey with the same executives two months earlier.

Nearly half, 41%, said they are creating custom applications to create a unique customer experience. Just as importantly, the workforce that supports that customer experience will increasingly be hybrid as 67% of respondents predicted the continued growth in 2023—a prediction that proved accurate as more companies continue to bring employees back to the office while continuing to provide work-from-home options.

Notably, a multi-cloud approach is crucial to achieve both of these operational imperatives. In addition to enabling IT teams to address important considerations like vendor lock-in and compliance mandates, a multi-cloud approach is increasingly a central characteristic of effective application development.

Developers want to use tools offered in different clouds in order to bring customer facing applications to market quickly. They also want to use the cloud best suited for the use case in question.

A multi-cloud approach is also increasingly synonymous with hybrid work, particularly for highly distributed organizations that not only must satisfy increasingly complex provisioning rules, but also a growing web of data sovereignty requirements. Indeed, for many organizations, complying with data sovereignty regulations requires a multi-cloud strategy.

For such reasons, a multi-cloud approach—one which was often hyped just a few years ago—is increasingly required. Given the importance of application development and the role hybrid and remote workers play in businesses, a multi-cloud strategy is now crucial to future-proof the modern, distributed enterprise.

VMware’s own journey, from the company’s pioneering of compute virtualization to the creation of technology offerings like VMware Aria, VMware Cloud, VMware Tanzu, and VMware Anywhere Workspace Solutions, reflects that reality. And it underscores the complexity involved in subsequent efforts to future-proof enterprises. As Raghu Raghuram, CEO of VMware recently noted in the VMware IT Performance Annual Report 2023, future-proofing is not easy, but it delivers significant benefits.

“With our cloud-smart strategy, VMware is ready to conquer the complexity our customers face—empowering them to juggle VMs and containers, existing and new apps, data centers and clouds, and IT operations and developers. We give them the power to innovate faster with the confidence that their workloads will be resilient, more secure, and more cost efficient wherever they are deployed.”

More information on the multi-cloud strategy VMware enables can be found here.