IDC TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT Sponsored By: IBM
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
IDC TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT Sponsored by: IBM The need for consistent distributed cloud management and control will increase as enterprises ramp up data-intensive digital business solutions across public cloud, on-premises datacenters, and edge computing locations. Digital Business Depends on Distributed Clouds April 2021 Written by: Mary Johnston Turner, Research Vice President, Future of Digital Infrastructure Enterprise Digital Strategies Are Built on Cloud AT A GLANCE Regardless of industry or geography, business is becoming more digital and data centric. The global pandemic and pivot to remote and virtual workplaces KEY STATS accelerated this transformation. As a result, IDC predicts that by 2022, 46% of » IDC predicts that 46% of enterprise enterprise products and services will be digital or digitally delivered worldwide. products and services will be digital or digitally delivered by 2022. Much of the growth in digital business is underpinned by public cloud, » IDC expects that cloud will account for software-defined on-premises datacenters, and edge computing platforms. 63% of IT infrastructure spend by 2024. DevOps and agile development efforts using cloud-native container platforms and services have allowed many enterprises to rapidly build and deploy KEY TAKEAWAYS The most successful digital enterprises are modern online business offerings that harness the power of highly advanced those that can optimize cloud and workload data, analytics, and developer services in the cloud. DevOps and digital deployments to meet the needs of specific line-of-business (LOB) teams have benefited from having access to highly applications and business processes while scalable cloud resources, without needing to worry about configuring or simultaneously managing risk, maintaining maintaining the underlying infrastructure, monitoring, and security. Whether compliance, optimizing costs, and ensuring consistent end-user experiences. supporting bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), or container workloads, cloud is expected to represent 63% of IT infrastructure spend by 2024. IDC estimates that 97% of enterprises currently rely on a mix of on-premises and public cloud resources. About 92% use at least two clouds, including both private clouds and public cloud services. The primary drivers for using multiple clouds focus on enabling workload-specific requirements and satisfying industry- and country-specific compliance and data privacy requirements. Complex, advanced data analytics, data streaming, and developer tooling are often easier to deploy as cloud services rather than being maintained as software on premises. As a result, enterprise buyers are looking closely at how different cloud service providers can support different workload profiles, policies, and service-level objectives (SLOs). Different workloads and use cases have unique security, access, data privacy, cost, performance, latency, and compliance requirements. Distributed cloud architectures spread across on-premises environments, public cloud platforms, hosted datacenters, and edge locations are here to stay. In this environment, the most successful digital enterprises are those that can optimize cloud consumption and workload deployments to meet the needs of specific applications and business processes while simultaneously managing risk, maintaining compliance, optimizing costs, facilitating innovation, and ensuring consistent end-user experiences. IDC TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT Digital Business Depends on Distributed Clouds Considering the Value of Consistent Services on Cloud to Edge to On Premises Over the past decade, many enterprise organizations have taken advantage of one or more cloud resources depending on the need of their developers and workloads. Enterprises have deployed applications to on-premises private clouds using automated VM-based operations. They have simultaneously built on-premises container clusters for cloud-native DevOps teams and deployed many types of applications onto public cloud platforms to take advantage of scaling, advanced analytics services, and automated disaster recovery. Managed cloud services and industry-specific cloud software offerings are also part of the mix. In many cases, deployment decisions are based on specific developer or LOB preferences, with minimal consideration for how the data, workflows, and transactions will scale, interact, and grow over time. Many organizations have developed ad hoc multicloud and hybrid cloud environments that reinforce, rather than break down, data, computing, storage, and analytics silos. Each cloud platform, whether in a public cloud or on premises, requires administrators who have expertise in that specific set of cloud management and security tools. Each cloud provider generates its own bills and relies on its own native configuration management tooling. The rapid adoption of cloud-native container platforms and orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes has allowed developers to move faster than ever, but it has further accelerated this proliferation of loosely coupled cloud infrastructure and data silos. Edge computing, which takes advantage of powerful new hardware combined with software-defined controls, is pushing increasingly sophisticated data collection and analysis away from central datacenters, creating even more complex operational and integration challenges. IDC's research shows that these evolving distributed multicloud and hybrid cloud architectures need to be connected and consistently managed. This strategy results in a number of challenges in delivering reliable, consistent, and secure application services on an end-to-end basis. The need for consistency becomes paramount to standardize operational configurations, increase use of automation, improve security postures and compliance reporting, increase IT staff productivity, and enhance end-to-end business performance. Cross-cloud control planes that allow enterprises to deploy workloads and manage cloud services consistently across on-premises, public cloud, and edge locations are emerging to enable a more efficient, standardized, and automated approach to managing and securing multiple clouds. Consistent visibility and control allow businesses to consume innovative cloud services from multiple providers and partners without creating barriers to scale and data integration. Consistent control also facilitates the ability to deploy workloads and process data at the edge, in a public cloud, or in the datacenter, freeing developers from having to become experts on cloud-specific configuration and security. #US47631321 Page 2 IDC TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT Digital Business Depends on Distributed Clouds The Business Case for Cross-Cloud Control Planes Facing the operational challenges created by hybrid and multicloud strategies, the majority of enterprises (71%) have identified consistent cross-cloud control planes as important to the long-term success of their cloud and cloud-native application initiatives, including edge. As shown in Figure 1, these organizations recognize that consistent cloud management, automation, observability, and security are critical to ensuring stable, scalable operational environments as well as for increasing time to value and improving both IT agility and end-user experiences. FIGURE 1: Top Business Case Metrics for Investing in Hybrid and Multicloud Management Tools Infrastructure and application stability improvement Speed/time to value IT operational agility Customer experience improvement 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 (% of respondents) n = 409 Source: IDC Cloud Pulse: Worldwide Enterprise Cloud Management Survey Insights (IDC #US46773120, August 2020) The business case for these extended cloud solutions recognizes that LOB, developer, ITOps, and CloudOps site reliability engineering (SRE) teams all benefit from consistent end-to-end management and security. Specifically: » Business stakeholders get greater assurance of reliable end-to-end application performance, security, and compliance thanks to consistent, comprehensive infrastructure stability and integrations. As new applications are deployed and made available to users and customers across diverse geographies, the ability to maintain service- level agreements (SLAs) at scale is vital to sustaining customer loyalty and goodwill. » Developers benefit in that their applications can get to market faster when configuration, security, and compliance controls can be defined once and consistently applied across clouds. Developers spend less time focusing on making sure they are working on the correctly configured platforms and get more time to develop code and collaborate with business leaders. They also gain tighter coordination and end-to-end automation to support continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) life-cycle automation efforts. » ITOps and CloudOps SRE teams are able to provision and scale infrastructure services with greater reliability and operational stability across edge, on-premises, and public cloud platforms. Less staff time needs to be devoted to configuring and monitoring each individual resource, and consistent instrumentation and observability analytics help detect end-to-end anomalies and remediate cross-cloud dependency problems sooner. IT staff is able to define and curate templates, policies, and access controls once and then reuse them at scale across their IT estate. #US47631321 Page 3 IDC TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT Digital Business Depends on Distributed Clouds Unlike traditional cloud management platforms that were deployed as appliances