The Horse Race for Multi-cloud Services Dominance

In today’s digital universe, multi-cloud is the strategy of choice for enterprises of all shapes and sizes. Enterprises and large organizations require the scale and flexibility that cloud provides to grow their businesses and remain competitive. This trend is borne out by the results of RightScale’s annual State of the Cloud Survey which found 81 percent of enterprises are taking a multi-cloud approach. The survey goes on to reveal that public cloud adoption has increased to 92 percent in 2018 from 89 percent in 2017, while private cloud adoption increased to 75 percent in 2018 from 72 percent the prior year.

Adoption rates are confirmed by predictions for increased public cloud investment. Survey respondents indicated that 20 percent of enterprises plan to more than double public cloud spend in 2018, and 71 percent stated they expect to increase public cloud spend more than 20 percent.

The undisputed leaders in the cloud services space are AWS and Microsoft Azure.  AWS remains dominant, but this past year, Azure has grown quickly, closing the gap with its biggest competitor. The State of the Cloud survey found that amongst enterprises, Azure increased adoption significantly from 43 percent to 58 percent, while AWS adoption increased from 59 percent to 68 percent. Clearly, we are seeing a horserace between industry giants, such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, as more and more enterprises migrate services and applications to public cloud infrastructures.

Enterprises are increasingly embracing multi-cloud strategies because of the significant benefits. However, the need for pervasive visibility is key to business success. As hybrid cloud becomes a progressively important part of the mix, organizations should be looking to take a smart data approach to ensure they have the visibility they need. Such an approach can deliver a highly-detailed picture of the hybrid IT environment, making service assurance possible. Armed with these invaluable insights, IT is able to gain a clear understanding of applications and service availability, reliability and responsiveness - both in real time and back-in-time – which allows them to more rapidly troubleshoot service issues. Having a “back-in-time” capability allows IT to learn from past mistakes and modify service delivery to mitigate future issues and risks.

Leveraging actionable intelligence based on an analysis of service and application dependencies is absolutely vital for mitigating business and IT risks, and maximizing investments in innovative cloud technologies.

This blog is based on the article, AWS, Azure growth proves the future is multi-cloud written by Michael Segal, Area Vice President Strategy at NETSCOUT, which was published on Microwave Engineering Europe.