Clearing up the Cloud

For most businesses, moving datacenter applications to the cloud represents both significant opportunity and unprecedented challenges. Industry estimates suggest that by 2021, as much as 94% of workloads will be processed in cloud data centers.1 The rationale is clear: applications hosted in the cloud represent a lower upfront investment in infrastructure, the potential for simplified operations, and an ability to respond to capacity demands that often outpace on-premise availability.

However, it is worth noting that a majority of businesses utilize two or more cloud service providers2, and more than half of IT professionals say that optimizing cloud spend is a top priority next year.3 While it is obvious that investment in cloud solutions is accelerating, it is equally clear that businesses of all sizes are not seeing the efficiencies that they had anticipated — and struggle to find a single cloud provider that meets all of their needs. 

Part of this challenge arises from the changing nature of IT in general. Technology is increasingly being leveraged beyond back-end business operations to provide revenue generation and competitive differentiation. Unfortunately, traditional operational best practices are often optimized around reducing churn and minimizing expenses, rather than agility, iterative development, and accelerating time to revenue.