Intelligent CIO North America Issue 10 | Page 82

FINAL WORD

Multi-cloud requires impeccable digital hygiene

Dave Russell , Vice President , Enterprise Strategy at Veeam Software , tells us businesses looking to deliberately form a multi-cloud strategy must first ensure that their standards of digital hygiene are fit for purpose .

Gartner estimates that by 2022 , 75 % of enterprise customers using cloud infrastructure as a service will adopt a deliberate multi-cloud strategy . Up from 49 % in 2017 , this is a fast-growing trend , which shows little sign of abating as businesses continue to ‘ mix and match ’ the services provided by the big four hyperscalers – AWS , Microsoft Azure , Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba .

With that said , Gartner ’ s used of the term ‘ deliberate ’ multi-cloud strategy is a telling one , as it implies that there is such a thing as an accidental or even haphazard counterpart . The truth is that there is and in the IT world this is a tale as old as time . Infrastructure evolves and expands organically , based on the need for short term fixes and challenges posed by managing increasing data volumes .
The pandemic underlined this fact in a big way . According to Veeam ’ s Data Protection Report 2021 , 50 % of CXOs in Saudi and 52 % in UAE said that the need to maintain operations during the pandemic had held back their strategic Digital Transformation initiatives . It is only now that we will see a shift as businesses move beyond the crisis stage of their COVID-19 response and start to look at how the digital infrastructure and skills they acquired through short-term necessity can be evolved into a coherent , longer-term vision .
There is no reason why the same is not true when it comes to multi-cloud . Flexera ’ s 2021 State of the Cloud Report found that 92 % of enterprises have a multi-cloud
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