Overcoming Risk to Achieve Cloud Without Compromise
Businesses’ cloud needs have changed greatly over the past two years. Those that ask the right cloud questions will find themselves best placed to thrive.
For many years, “cloud” has been a buzzword in the technology industry and often seen as the ultimate digital transformation goal for businesses. Yet what many have viewed as a destination is a tool. In other words, cloud without compromise means customers are realizing they need to shift their mindset from a place to an operational model.
Many businesses are now looking to the cloud as a solution to the new level of complexity they face. But doing this won’t solve anything by itself. Every business is uniquely structured, with its own unique objectives, and customers say it is essential to perform an internal audit leading to a broader cloud strategy before rolling-out a cloud solution. Customers realize failure to do this raises the risk of business disruption down the line, which completely undermines some of the chief goals of cloud adoption – resilience and agility.
When it comes to risk, customers are talking about scenarios like outages that can compromise their business, as well as losing flexibility by being locked into a single system as their business evolves. They see that when they distribute workloads freely according to their characteristics, they reduce risk – provided they can easily manage those workloads from a single platform that enables hybrid multicloud.
Tailored approach to minimising risk
Minimizing risk begins with tailoring cloud strategy to match business goals. By definition, a tailored approach helps businesses avoid the trap of putting all their eggs in one basket by betting on a single cloud solution (usually a single public cloud) to do all the work. Tailoring means seeing the cloud for what it is – a tool that can help businesses run optimally. It means recognizing that some parts of a business would be best left where they are, while others would indeed be best served by public cloud, private cloud or multiple clouds in a hybrid multicloud environment.
In India, companies have embarked on a journey to ramp up hybrid multicloud implementation, according to our recent Enterprise Cloud Index report. The report shows that a hybrid multicloud model is the model of choice in India, with 84 percent of India’s enterprises preferring to adopt the same, and 58 percent planning to implement such environments within three years.
The untapped potential of cloud to drive higher business returns
As more organizations reap the benefits of technology they have implemented to prepare for the future, there is no doubt cloud will only continue to grow in importance in 2022 and beyond. But as IT leaders have worked to keep pace with these rapid changes, questions around where to run workloads have become increasingly more complex.
Getting the most from cloud could mean leapfrogging directly to the public cloud faster and more economically, modernizing a data center to achieve cloud-like agility, or implementing a hybrid multicloud approach. Businesses also need a simple set of tools to help them gain the optimal payoff from their cloud investments.
In recent months, we have seen several companies think carefully and achieve cloud without compromise.
In these and numerous other examples, the common factor has been the businesses asking the right cloud questions: rather than how do I get to the cloud, how do I best use cloud for my business? Ultimately, cloud is an investment, and businesses can mitigate risk by tailoring their strategy to their needs. That starts with honest self-examination, then diversifying as they would with any other portfolio.
(The author Mr.Faiz Shakir, Managing Director, Sales, India & SAARC, Nutanix and the views expressed in this article are his own)
