The Evolution of Cloud Adoption: From Cost Savings to Business Transformation

The mass adoption of cloud services across enterprises around the world started with cost benefits being the main driver, as a means of moving away from capital expenditure-heavy IT infrastructures. There was initial integration, but operations on the platform mainly consisted of cloud-native services. Once enterprises got used to the cloud, they started leveraging its speed, taking advantage of the dynamic data management and ease of application development that the platform provides. With this realization, they started shifting core business applications & workloads onto the cloud. Now, cloud has become a key driver of digital transformation, with enterprises cognizant of the fact that it could open up entirely new business approaches and optimize everything from supply chains to sales. 

Somewhere in this journey, enterprises came to a key discovery: no one single system or technology is the right solution for every project. It has become apparent that a “one cloud fits all” environment cannot scale sufficiently and doesn’t create significant value for your enterprise. On the other hand, while cloud adoption is highly beneficial, it should be done in a way that enables you to maintain & benefit from the legacy systems you have created in the past. 

This complex scenario has led to hybrid multicloud becoming an increasingly preferred option for companies across the world.

What is Hybrid Multicloud? A Flexible Ecosystem for Optimal IT

Let’s first understand what this term is by breaking it down. Hybrid refers to something composed of multiple other things, while multicloud involves an environment with more than one cloud computing service. Therefore, together, hybrid multicloud is indicative of an IT infrastructure that uses a mix of on-premises services and public/private clouds from multiple providers. With this ecosystem, organizations have the flexibility of choosing what makes sense for each individual task, project or component. You can maintain your existing platforms to benefit from their rich heritage, integrating them with new techniques and capabilities from the cloud when appropriate.

These benefits have led to hybrid multicloud being widely adopted, particularly in India. A recent Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey by our partners Nutanix has seen it become the dominant deployment among Indian enterprises, with 44% of companies using it – a figure that surpasses all the other ECI countries surveyed. Furthermore, a recent hybrid multicloud report by IBM shed light on how Indian mainstays are leveraging it to transform their operations:

• Godrej Group saw a 10% reduction in total cost of ownership over 5 years and zero security incidents by integrating a hybrid multicloud that migrated all mission-critical applications and enabled seamless orchestration of workloads across multiple clouds.
• Vodafone Idea improved user experience for its 300 million subscribers by deploying a new hybrid multicloud platform that allowed its applications to run on a common cloud architecture across its central IT operations and distributed cloud microsites across the country.
• Bharti Airtel improved time-to-market and reduced capital expenses by adopting an open cloud architecture with end-to-end, intent-based lifecycle management. 

Challenges of Implementing Hybrid Multicloud in Indian Enterprises

However, despite all the success stories, there are significant challenges when it comes to adopting hybrid multicloud for Indian enterprises. The Nutanix ECI report identifies the 5 major challenges for Indian IT professionals when it comes to creating a successful hybrid cloud in India:

1. Data Privacy (61% of respondents identified this as a major challenge)
2. Ransomware Protection & Data Security (60%)
3. Linking Data From Multiple Environments (49%)
4. Following Guidance on Data Storage & Usage (47%)
5. Cloud Cost Control (44%)

All this is because proliferation of various public and private clouds, combined with large sections of traditional systems, can create a complicated, over unwieldy IT environment. Each cloud has its own tool sets & governance structures, and if all of them are managed suboptimal, costs can get significantly higher, the lack of interoperability can hinder your business agility and the fragmentation that comes with it can lead to security gaps. Malicious actors are paying attention to this complex scenario, with the IBM Cost of Data Breach 2024 indicating that 40% of breaches involved data stored across multiple environments. 

The consensus is that undertaking a cloud-smart approach forms the crux of this advantage, with 99% of IT professionals in India focused on adopting it for their infrastructure strategy. A cloud-smart approach essentially means giving each individual application its optimal IT environment from the myriad options. This classification is based on various factors like whether the application interacts with external parties or strictly internally, the storage size and number of servers required, how many hours workloads need to run per day, etc. Through this, a pattern emerges when it comes to how enterprises are ideally shaping their hybrid multicloud infrastructure:

• Public clouds being incorporated for customer-facing engagement and collaboration applications
• Private clouds for mission-critical workloads that require additional security 
• Traditional IT environments where workloads are siloed behind firewalls, constraining the free flow of data that attackers can exploit

Achieving the Hybrid Multicloud Advantage: 4 Key Goals and Solutions

In hybrid multicloud’s best iteration, the applications residing in all these infrastructures become portable, interoperable, optimized and manageable. Here are some solutions to achieve these 4 key goals.

Goal: Portability —> Solution: Containers for smooth software movement

India has a high container adoption rate, with 63% of respondents in the ECI survey saying they have containerized more than half of their applications. Containers are packaged environments that allow software to move smoothly across all stages, from development to testing to production, without the need to be rewritten. 

While containers help achieve portability, they can also help with transformation through their “build once, deploy anywhere” advantage. This means that once you finish writing your application in a container, you can deploy them anywhere in your ecosystem. Moreover, incorporating container environments local to your mainframe can help modernize them and make applications portable across the ecosystem.

Goal: Interoperability —> Solution: Open-Source Platforms like Kubernetes.

To optimize the benefits of your hybrid multicloud, businesses need to orchestrate tasks across different types of clouds & IT infrastructures. By using open source platforms, you have the management capabilities to promote multi-vendor interoperability. You can leverage the ecosystem of innovation partners and open-source developers while avoiding vendor lock-in.

Kubernetes is one such open-source platform that is used to manage workloads and services in containers and enable consistent, automated deployment of applications.

Goal: Optimization —> Solution: Strategic automation to mitigate risks and save costs.

Cloud misconfigurations are the most common vulnerability attackers exploit, and there are dozens of possible misconfigurations in a single cloud platform. Adopt multiple such cloud platforms, and the risks exponentially rise. This is where automation should come in and be a tool to streamline repetitive and manual tasks.

Here are some areas to incorporate automation in your hybrid multicloud strategy:

• Combining and eliminating redundant servers
• Identifying unused storage & applications that are still running and being charged
• Setting time parameters for when certain development and testing apps run
• Service provisioning

Goal: Effective Management —> Solution: Multicloud Management Platform

You can only effectively manage your hybrid multicloud by having complete visibility into the entire infrastructure. Cloud management platforms integrate complex multicloud systems into a single IT control environment that has end-to-end coverage and capabilities. They allow users to comprehensively consume, orchestrate and govern IT services across multiple components and systems. 

Some of the key supporting tools for these management platforms include CaaS (containers as a service), docker containers, Linux, serverless cloud services, microservices and VMs. Evolution is key for the management platform’s efficacy, with efforts required from your end to optimize continuously, govern holistically, enable self-service and use data gathered to improve your strategies.

To reap all the benefits of the hybrid multicloud advantage as an Indian enterprise, we recommend using the hybrid multicloud management platform provided by our partners Nutanix. This is an industry-standard software that streamlines your operations, facilitates universal application deployment, incorporates security-first design and promotes flexible computing. The results are truly transformative:

• 97% reduction in unplanned downtime
• 62% average TCO savings achieved by customers
• 477% ROI realized

Demo our solution today to get the hybrid multicloud advantage!