From Adoption to Transformation
Mon 22 Feb 2016
As cloud pervades and objectives shift towards digital transformation, new challenges emerge.
Cloud is now firmly established as a reliable enterprise workhorse, but what’s most interesting is how it is driving transformation.
Companies are using it to change the way they do business and find new opportunities to grow. According to Verizon’s State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2016 report, 69% of companies said they have used cloud to significantly reengineer at least one business process.
But it’s not just IT functions that are changing. Cloud providers are too, offering increasingly sophisticated and powerful services that enable even the largest organizations to put virtually their entire infrastructure in the cloud.
The multi-cloud conundrum
The debate over adoption is largely over. Virtually all businesses now use cloud to some degree. The challenge now is how best to manage and orchestrate multiple clouds from multiple vendors.
For example, three-quarters of IT decision makers are planning multi-cloud architectures, with 53% already using 2 to 4 cloud providers. This will grow to 6 to 10 in the coming year.[i]
As more and more users and devices connect to the network, challenges compound, such as leveraging multiple clouds to serve the different needs of different workloads, and orchestrating across multiple different cloud providers’ consoles, APIs and security profiles.
Unified application, middleware and infrastructure automation and orchestration solutions are critical to supporting rapid, cost-effective workload provisioning, migration, patching and life-cycle support. More than 60% of enterprise IT organizations will need to purchase new or updated automation and orchestration software and services to enable their plans by the end of 2017.[ii]
As IT departments attempt to manage all of this, issues with governance, security and skills gaps increasingly come to the fore.
This can hold back transformation efforts, such as improving the customer experience, at a time when businesses need to adapt and respond faster than ever.
Solution: Take control of your cloud ecosystem
To remain competitive, you need to be able to leverage the best services from a combination of cloud providers without compromising on security, control or risk of significantly increasing complexity.
In today’s cloud market, companies are finding that for the majority of cloud providers, the integration of private connections to their existing networks have lengthy and costly processes.
Secure Cloud Interconnect (SCI) puts you in control of your cloud ecosystem, addressing pent-up demand for access to public cloud services in a reliable, private, secure environment.
By establishing SCI connections from our Private IP network to a global ecosystem of strategic cloud providers, Verizon is able to simplify and speed-up once complex provisioning processes to cloud services and help improve end-user performance, security and governance in a multi-cloud environment.
Cloud is the great enabler
Whether it’s developing internet of things services, speeding innovation or creating new customer experiences, cloud is an important enabler. But these exciting opportunities cannot be realized without first overcoming the challenges of integrating multiple clouds into a seamless environment.
[i] Dimensional Research, 2015
[ii] IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2016 Predictions – Mastering the Raw Material of Digital Transformation”, IDC, Nov 2015
