Multi-cloud has become a fact of life in today’s era. More than 90% of organizations use public cloud, and more than 80% have multi-cloud environments. On average, organizations use 4.8 clouds, with enterprises running 32% of workloads in public cloud and 45% in private cloud.
However, while most organizations are using multiple clouds, they are not always using all of those clouds efficiently or strategically—particularly when viewed in comparison with on-premises infrastructure, which can provide benefits in IT control, security, performance, costs and agility.
The use of on-premises infrastructure is especially relevant among companies that have embraced IT Transformation: Those companies are 8x more likely than legacy companies to have IT infrastructure that is as good as or better than a public cloud in terms of operating costs.
The reality is that many public cloud initiatives started outside as shadow IT, with line of business managers or DevOps teams purchasing services on their own. Even within IT, decisions on which workloads to put into which cloud are often made based on expedience rather than intelligence.
This approach leads to problems. Many organizations are dealing with cloud sprawl, which can cause costs to spiral out of control, leave gaps in security and visibility, and create a situation in which strategic data is isolated in silos and not leveraged across the full organization.
The need to make informed cloud decisions
It is important for IT teams to get the situation under control and make informed, data-based decisions about which workloads to move to which cloud and when. Otherwise, the organization is exposed to unnecessary risks—cost overruns, potential damage to brand reputation and customer goodwill, security breaches, failure to meet compliance requirements and an inability to effectively use data as a competitive differentiator.
To best determine which workloads to put into which clouds—whether private, public or hybrid—it is important to have a clear and comprehensive view of your current IT environment and workloads.
You may find, as many organizations do, that the push to move workloads to public cloud environments should not be done either hastily or with incomplete information. This not only leads to cloud sprawl, but it can also be extremely wasteful in terms of IT budgets.
If you can keep the workload running on your own infrastructure, whether hybrid or private cloud, you will be better able to manage costs, deliver the appropriate performance, scale as necessary and provide consistent security protections and policies.
At the same time, if you can use data-driven information to determine which workloads can optimally run in public cloud, you can more effectively use public cloud services to strategically complement your on-premises or hybrid cloud environment.
Taking a data-based approach
Typically, most IT teams have not had access to real-time data about how their infrastructure is performing for each workload, based on usage patterns within their own environment. That lack of information has made it more challenging to choose the right cloud for each workload.
With access to real-time data and analytics, IT can be more efficient and make more informed choices about which workloads to move to which clouds, eliminating the guesswork and gut-level decision-making that have been necessary until now.
Live Optics is a vendor-agnostic free solution that empowers IT to take a data-based approach to infrastructure decisions—including how and when to use private, public or hybrid cloud for each workload. Live Optics enables IT to eliminate guesswork in managing workloads, with the ability to model project requirements for future workload demands.
Conclusion
In today’s environment, cloud has become an essential tool in terms of reducing costs, increasing agility and reducing complexity. But most organizations are still challenged by how to use cloud services, particularly public cloud, most efficiently for their workloads.
With real-world data about their infrastructure and workloads, IT teams can make better decisions about when to move workloads to public cloud—and when not to.
For more information on how your organization can leverage real-world data to make better decisions on choosing the right cloud platform for each workload, please explore the benefits of Live Optics.
