Rise of the Multicloud Enterprise: Key Trends to Watch in 2015

by Chris Preimesberger

Responding to increasing pressures to reduce costs while increasing productivity, enterprise IT departments will sharply increase their adoption of cloud services, definitively shifting the balance from client/server to cloud-delivered applications. By the end of 2015, most enterprises will have the majority of their data storage, backup, disaster recovery and business intelligence apps delivered by cloud service providers. A Dimensional Research survey found that 77 percent of IT professionals are planning to deploy to multiple clouds within the next 12 months.

From the Fortune 500 to small and medium enterprises, companies in every sector and every geography will embrace hybrid cloud architectures and service delivery. Hybrid cloud strategies most often bring businesses the best performance at the lowest cost, whether users are accessing collaboration applications via the public cloud or performing disaster recovery via a private cloud within a multitenant data center. Finding a company using only client/server applications could be extremely difficult by the end of the year.

High-growth enterprises, driving increased revenue through globalization, will increasingly turn to cloud services, regardless of geographic location. Why build expensive and expansive data centers and applications worldwide and hire the local IT support staff needed to run them when you can lease them from a growing pool of global providers? Why commit CAPEX when there’s a much more cost-effective OPEX solution? Global cloud deployments speed time to market, keep costs low, and maintain consistency of providers and services. In 2015, CIOs at winning companies will commit to the cloud and never look back.

CIOs will require software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery of the applications they need as a foundational element of RFP development and application selection criteria, eschewing on-site deployments. Winners in the software industry will recognize that server-based deployments are the exception, not the rule, and will place the majority of their development and sales focus on SaaS.

While cloud services offer clear benefits in terms of cost reduction and increased performance, how companies select, secure and maintain them is in flux. Few CIOs have comprehensive visibility into the hundreds of cloud providers developing applications and other services that can help their companies excel. Smart companies will even outsource the outsourcing of their cloud services.

Companies will continue to adopt a variety of best-of-breed solutions that ensure performance and flexibility, which providing choice and interoperability. This gives both network and cloud service providers who have embraced opportunities to peer with others through third-party exchanges multiple opportunities for success. Those who rely on vendor lock-in will be scrambling to re-evaluate their previously successful business models.

The current trend of businesses (cloud providers and enterprises alike) migrating to multitenant data centers will dominate the cloud landscape. According to the 2014 Talkin’ Cloud100 survey, 86 percent of cloud providers host their services in colocation data centers. On the enterprise side, Dimensional Research reported that 45 percent of new cloud-based apps deployed over the next year will be hosted by colocation providers. Multitenant data centers bring more companies closer together to access a vast number of resources. This dense ecosystem allows for vendor neutrality, fast time to market and access, flexibility, ease of service and cost-savings when deploying and consuming cloud services.

Enterprises deploying multicloud architectures will require secure, high-performance private connections that are scalable and on-demand and provide access to multiple clouds using multiple network technologies across multiple global access points. Dimensional Research reported that 72 percent of IT professionals see security as a top benefit of a direct connection to cloud providers, recognizing the clear benefits that they provide over access via the public Internet.

Hybrid and multicloud computing are paving the way to a plethora of new markets, such as the Internet of things and the industrial Internet; new enabling technologies, such as cloud-based predictive analytics for big data; and many new innovations that have yet to be discovered. This is poised to be the year when enterprises take a giant leap to the cloud.