Why are we moving towards a multi-cloud environment?

By CIOReview | Monday, February 26, 2018

The highly anticipated digital transformation is backed by cloud technologies, owing to the computational horsepower delivered through cloud PaaS (Platform as a Service). However, due to diversities connected to the applications of cloud technology, variations within the cloud ecosystem have been evident since the early iterations of cloud technology. Cloud configurations such as public cloud, private cloud, shared hosting, and on-premise infrastructures constitute a unique blend of multi-cloud configurations for various business requirements and operations. The growing need for such cloud configurations has scaled to newer heights with recorded data traffic of 6.0 Zettabytes per year. By the year 2021, the estimate is tipped to reach 19.5 Zettabytes, with the cloud-based data exchanges accounting up to 95 percent of the total data traffic. Additionally, with the surge of IoT, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence, multi-cloud configurations can only aid to the development of these technologies.

Inter-operability and sandbox techniques are few of the other technological applications that employ cloud computation, specifically multi-cloud configurations, to deliver remote access to mainframe computers. With organizations diversifying their operations across multiple locations, the need for on-premise, on-demand infrastructures has substantially increased. The $33.29 billion industry, as recorded in 2017, is expected to grow by threefold, constituting a compounded annual estimate of $90 billion by 2021. Predominantly adopted across North America, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and Latin America, the multi-cloud ecosystem is classified into banking and financial services, insurance, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, government, and public sectors. These industries rightly leverage the demand-based flexibility of the hybrid cloud model with big data analytics to process information in large segments.