Fascinating insights from the Forrester’s Cloud Computing Accelerates Enterprise Transformation Everywhere report highlight the growing dominance of cloud computing architecture on enterprise businesses. Forrester and other research agencies opine that 50%+ of the global enterprises will begin to strongly rely on any singular public cloud platform to expand their internal business operations and serve customers.
The global public cloud market will increase from $146 billion in 2017 to $178 billion in 2018, with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google capturing 76% of the total revenue in 2018.
As the IT head of an organization or in any similar role, understanding the impact of cloud platforms and implementing them in the organization has become significant in 2018, leading to these three cloud resolutions.
#1 Enabling a Multi-Cloud Approach
Depending on a singular cloud infrastructure can lead to problems such as higher costs and unpredictable downtimes that will negatively impact the enterprise operations. A multi-cloud approach, implying the use of two or more cloud services, resolves the problems. Business and technical goals such as better pricing, cloud servicing features, and data sovereignty help the enterprise to remain agile. There are increased redundancy and optimal cloud structure usages.
The multi-cloud approach is flexible. In a survey of 260 enterprises by EMA, 61% of the respondents reported in favor or using two or more cloud providers and 35% of the respondents using four or more public clouds. The multi-cloud approach enables the enterprise to select features from varied cloud service providers and scale. The enterprise can avoid vendor lock-in agreement which usually happens when working with a single service provider.
The multi-cloud environment consists of various components that run smoothly. While favorable to use, IT experts and developers should be mindful of creating a secure environment to transmit sensitive data. The data should flow seamlessly and should be equipped to balance the load. Bottlenecks or data throttling will devastate the cloud infrastructure. Follow industry and geography-specific compliance requirement as well.
#2 Lean Scaling of DevOps
DevOps is a vast concept, which can be ideally defined as the “practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development to production support” (source). DevOps is dictating a new approach to cloud computing. The combination of cloud computing with DevOps builds a leaner and agile process, which improves application delivery speed, processes business requirements quicker, build and deploy technology, and lower operational costs.
Automation of agile methodology, DevOps empowers developers to mitigate business needs in real-time. Since cloud computing is a centralized process, its gives automation standard to DevOps and presents a centralized platform for building technology, testing, and deployment.
Almost all cloud platforms support DevOps through multi-nodal integrations. As such, enterprise costs usually associated with on-premise DevOps automation reduces, offers better operational control and centralized governance.
#3 Security Consultants Drive Organizations to Cloud Architecture
Security consultants, security administrator or a security architect – irrespective of the name, the role of the person is an important one. Even with the ever-growing reliance on cloud platforms, there is an expansive need to monitor the security of cloud platforms and patch any vulnerability.
An unmonitored downtime can cost an enterprise an immense loss of data.
The role of the security consultant involves deploying and monitoring enterprise-class security solutions, without any compromise on cybersecurity framework functions in relation to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. It is the security architect who becomes the point of contact between the cloud technology and the enterprise.
The person is responsible for designing security solutions for supporting cloud deployments, providing technical oversight, and ensuring that the technological infrastructure is sufficient for meeting enterprise goals. The responsible person or the team works closely with the cloud solutions and the enterprise team for building design specifications, functional architectures, and implementation plans.
In short, the job involves coordinating between cloud providers and internal organizational interface. The coordination happens on all deployment levels, and also involves understanding the limitations, if any, of the cloud service, their interactional mechanisms, and its scalability. Security consultants will play a prominent and unavoidable role in this year’s cloud solution programs.
In conclusion, choosing and integrating a cloud infrastructure is crucial for any enterprise to scale and follow a centralized approach to organizational governance.