Cloudy with a chance of chaos in 2021

Industry thinking has moved over the years from discussing the advantages of cloud to whether private or public clouds are better and now beyond that to a hybrid approach. Cloud adoption also accelerated in 2020 as a result of the need to keep operations running during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Technology services embedded in the cloud have proven that their flexibility and scalability enable businesses to continue to thrive despite the macro landscape, and so I believe you will continue to see the accelerated adoption of cloud services," noted Yancey Spruill, CEO, DigitalOcean.

Source: One Identity. Cetin.

"In 2020 we watched the world dramatically accelerate forward in terms of cloud adoption. We saw five years of cloud adoption in five months. No longer are cloud technologies something companies are looking at as optional, they are the preferred option now. The pandemic and the subsequent ubiquitous remote work made software-as-a-service and the cloud the new norm," said Serkan Cetin, Technical Director, APJ, One Identity. 

"2021 will be the year of the cloud-first architecture. No longer will it be an all-or-nothing approach and no longer will people make the trade-off between functionality and cloud – they’d want the same functionality independent of the deployment model. Enterprises will move instead towards a more pragmatic approach to the cloud where they choose the approach that’s right for their business. From attaching cloud-delivered microservices to on-prem solutions to enterprises moving away from physical infrastructure to being completely in the public cloud, there’s no longer a correct answer for how to utilise the cloud.

"2021 will be the year of creating the cloud that offers the highest-level of value to the enterprise. Protecting this new cloud-first world is going to become the No. 1 priority for security organisations."

"The acceleration of cloud adoption is here to stay. According to Veritas’ 2020 Ransomware Resiliency Report, 45% of organisations are currently using between five to 20 cloud services. This rising multicloud complexity will also see organisations increase their reliance on both channel partners and vendors to navigate this route smoothly," said Andy Ng, VP and MD, Asia South Region, Veritas Technologies.

It's definitely all about hybrid and multicloud strategies, said Ho Chye Soon, Singapore Country Manager, Nutanix. “Many APJ companies that wanted to run head first into the cloud are catching up with their US counterparts, who realised several years ago that many mission critical or legacy applications vital to the running of a business aren’t right for the cloud.

"Companies want cloud-like capabilities but need to keep optionality and flexibility. No one wants to be locked into anything. As such, CIOs will begin insisting on hybrid and multicloud strategies, or at the very least insist on portability assurances as they become increasingly cloud-smart. In fact, 70% of Singapore respondents believe that their organisations would experience improved agility with hosting applications in a hybrid IT infrastructure, according to our recent Hybrid Cloud Survey," Ho said.

"Globally, we have seen many organisations begin to modernise their applications and shift to a cloud-first strategy, only to hit a wall when they find that key applications cannot be efficiently migrated nor refactored to a cloud-friendly model. Instead, a hybrid and multicloud strategy will be necessary to balance desire for cloud agility and economics with the reality of sustaining operations.

"This will also enable the quarter-on-quarter agility businesses will need for the foreseeable future. Organisations will learn to take the long-term view and avoid being locked into something that next quarter might not work, if the world suddenly looks completely different."

While multiple clouds across multiple locations improves resiliency and optimises access delay for distributed workforces, enterprises will need solutions that allow them to easily switch from one cloud to another in hours rather than months. In addition to the big cloud players, they may consider smaller, regional ones that offer service specificities and data protection capabilities, said EfficientIP in a list of 2021 predictions. 

"Effective control of these environments will rely on cross-platform visibility and automation. That all starts with an accurate view of the IP plan structure & resources, making it important to use a cloud- agnostic DDI solution which brings global visibility, allows management of external resources and is fully meshed in the automation processes with other IT solutions," the company said. DDI stands for a cluster of technologies, domain name system (DNS), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and IP address management (IPAM).

"Though the move from on-premises to the cloud and hybrid IT was well under way before the pandemic, this transition was accelerated by COVID-19. In 2021, traditional IT professionals will have to rethink how to best manage apps as hybrid IT becomes the new reality," said Adam Hert, Head Geek, SolarWinds.

"One of the major challenges accompanying this is simultaneously managing legacy and modern applications. To do this effectively, tech pros will need to refocus efforts on implementing full-stack application performance management (APM) to best optimise their environments and resolve application performance problems faster and more efficiently.

"With integrated APM, application-level assessments such as root cause summary, response time, load patterns, and resource usage will make it easier to identify problems, allowing optimal performance and freeing up tech pros’ time. In turn, this will lessen the impact on users and the bottom line, which will be the main business priority in a post-COVID world."

But hybrid IT has its disadvantages too, if more than one cloud provider is involved. "The benefits of a multicloud strategy have been hyped significantly and include everything from flexibility and reliability to cost-performance optimisation. But deploying data and workloads across multiple clouds shouldn’t be an industry best practice," explained Patrick Hubbard, Head Geek, SolarWinds.

"Now and in the future, we’ll see a growing number of companies rethink multicloud or consolidate around a single cloud provider."

Hubbard elaborated further: "With multicloud adoption, there’s a lag between initial investment and deployment. Those who first started with a multicloud strategy may grow to realise how expensive and quickly-complicated it can get, making the return on investment (ROI) questionable.

"It’s expensive because it requires a high level of understanding for each target platform, a strong development team, an observability and monitoring focus, orchestration-first processes, nearly complete change automation, and more. For most businesses, there are also some lost cost opportunities because not all cloud providers offer the same services mix, especially for advanced services — and this is where things start to get more complicated. Businesses must develop and maintain advanced cross-cloud services in-house for anything not common to all target platforms.

"As we see organisations rethink multicloud, they must also think about what success looks like. This usually depends on two 'must-haves'. First, businesses pursuing a multicloud strategy must either wield a high-performing, DevOps-focused team of IT professionals or have the budget to outsource multicloud engineering and monitoring to someone else. Second, they must have a well-researched case for why they believe multicloud will meet their business needs in the first place."