Why Embracing the Cloud is Driving Innovation for Networking

Organizations are accelerating their digital transformation and cloud development plans, which is pushing them to consider new hybrid and multi-cloud architectures that take advantage of the best cloud technology resources, wherever they reside. This is something we’re seeing everyday with our customers. By adopting these new architectures, organizations are giving their IT, network, and cybersecurity teams the capabilities needed to manage applications and assets on premises, in a cloud, or even in multiple clouds. By embracing this new mix of public, private, and hybrid cloud, IT teams need new and innovative tools to manage and automate across their hybrid cloud network infrastructure.

This prominent focus and shift toward hybrid cloud networking led to the release of a new Futuriom report, “The Future of Hybrid Cloud Automation,” outlining the drivers that are pushing organizations to find better tools to scale and balance infrastructure resources as well as the benefits a hybrid architecture provides.

The Drivers of Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Network Infrastructure Adoption

There are many drivers of the move to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud; digital transformation projects, hybrid work arrangements, automation, and data analytics efforts enabled by cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), among others. More than ever, organizations want to connect and integrate multiple resources in the cloud and on premises.

Here are a few key trends (and the proof to back it up) that are driving hybrid and multi-cloud network infrastructure adoption:

Digital Transformation
34% of respondents in a recent State of Cloud Strategy survey by HashiCorp, cited digital transformation as a top driver for multi-cloud adoption. Even more, 90% of businesses with more than 5,000 employees said they have adopted multi-cloud, and 64% of large-enterprise respondents said multi-cloud has helped achieve their business goals.

Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Have Already Been Embraced.
In the 2022 State of the Cloud report from Flexera, 89% of companies surveyed reported having a multi-cloud strategy, and 80% were taking a hybrid approach (753 total respondents).

Embracing the Cloud Drives Innovation.
Hybrid cloud architectures are likely to be implemented by the most cloud-savvy companies, and history has shown these organizations derive larger benefits from cloud. For example, a McKinsey study showed that cloud-embracing companies generated more profits and faster time-to-market than those slower to embrace the cloud.

Cost is a Concern
The Flexera survey indicated that one of the largest cloud concerns is cost management. The average cloud spend goes over budget by 13%, according to the survey, and respondents self-estimated that their organizations waste an average of 32% on cloud spend.

Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Cloud Features are in High Demand
A recent study commissioned by Google with IDG indicates that multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support was viewed as a “musthave” by 30% of respondents and as a “major consideration” by 47% (2,000 IT decisionmakers).

Cloud Migration & Hybrid are Still in Early Days
A survey of 1,200 enterprise information technology (IT) pros by cloud migration specialist Next Pathway reveals that while hybrid and multi-cloud strategies are of interest to enterprises, most enterprises may be years away from achieving that goal. Of those surveyed, 43.1% of enterprises cited a lack of experienced internal skills to plan and execute a cloud migration; 52.1% of companies agreed that multi-cloud is a good strategy, but 32.1% are still debating the overall value. Meanwhile, only 30% of companies said they had hybrid cloud in production.

Each trend further validates that the tools and technologies that help end users manage and develop their hybrid cloud architectures are in strong demand.

The Benefits of Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Architectures

There’s no doubt that it’s still early days, as many organizations are still struggling to migrate to the cloud itself. But the benefits of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures are becoming clear, and it’s likely that most organizations will move to some form of hybrid cloud over time.

Although it’s early days, there are already some key business benefits being measured in hybrid cloud environments:

Workload Agility
The capability to move workloads to the most efficient resources, whether they are on public or private clouds.

Cost Control
As noted in the drivers research above, one of the main concerns that end users have about public cloud are its rapidly escalating costs. Building a hybrid cloud architecture enables them to gain back control over costs.

Control Over Data & Applications
Building cloud apps in a hybrid cloud architecture gives control back to the organization, which may feel uneasy about the potential “lock-in” of having all data and apps in a public cloud construct.

What This Means for the Networks

Hybrid and multi-cloud implementations are putting more demands than ever on network infrastructure. Connecting multiple cloud environments and traditional networks requires a flexible networking infrastructure that can also be managed, monitored to ensure security and compliance, and automated to ensure no down time or errors and to streamline overall operations and management. However, existing references to network automation are often focused on one silo – enterprise, data center, or cloud – and aren’t useful in how we approach automation across heterogeneous and distributed network infrastructure. That’s why the network is often viewed as one of the more challenging pieces of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies.

This is pushing networking companies to innovate a new kind of network automation that is needed to coordinate the entire realm of networks: service mesh, overlay networks, and traditional underlays. By providing integrated and flexible solutions, teams will finally be able to reap the full benefits of their hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure.

It’s clear that hybrid and multi-cloud networks are here to stay, it’s time to evaluate an integrated and flexible approach to automation. To view the full report for yourself, click here. You can also learn about Itential is helping organizations of all sizes simplify and scale automation across their hybrid cloud network infrastructure here.