A brand new examine from Cloudreach and IDC entitled “Cloud Trends 2021” (registration required) surveyed greater than 200 CIOs. Questions centered on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the usage of cloud computing and digital transformation. Keep in thoughts that the sponsor has a canine within the hunt in that they promote know-how.
Of course, it’s the standard “cloud is good,” “cloud is important” stuff you discover in most different analyst experiences. However, the quantity that I discovered attention-grabbing is that 27.5 % acknowledged that large-scale migration to the general public cloud was “essential for survival.” Hop in a time machine and simply 5 years in the past most enterprises thought-about cloud as an possibility for consuming know-how such storage and compute, however actually not important. What modified?
When the pandemic first hit with its related lockdowns, these with bodily infrastructure, resembling conventional enterprise information facilities, have been at an obstacle. They not solely couldn’t scale as much as help a distant workforce, however in some instances they couldn’t even get certified staffers bodily into the information facilities to swap out servers, repair energy provides, or right community points. The non-cloud a part of the enterprise suffered—no less than it elevated threat to an unacceptable degree.
Businesses study from ache. What occurred in 2020 might be a part of strategic planning for the following decade, with the general public cloud considered as a secure harbor, fairly than simply an possibility for consumption. What does this imply for your enterprise?
First, if the cloud is important, then you should plan for occasions when issues go flawed. Although outages are uncommon, generally they’re attributable to avoidable person errors. This means you should put extra planning into enterprise continuity/catastrophe restoration techniques in addition to into cross-cloud redundancy.
Enterprises that use cloud might imagine that resiliency is inbuilt to the cloud and such planning is de facto not wanted. But public clouds use a shared accountability mannequin, and many of the planning to maintain techniques going falls on enterprise IT.
Second, you should be involved about doable actions by your cloud supplier. Keep in thoughts that they’ll terminate service in the event that they suppose they’ve a motive, or they might hand over your information to authorities relying on the legal guidelines of the land. You must ask a large number of questions to verify these points are dealt with in any authorized agreements.
For most enterprises this implies not having all your eggs in a single basket….
