According to Forrester, enterprises will use an average of 8.7 public clouds in 2023. Management and support are urgently needed, says Sophie Decock of VMware.

The cloud potential for businesses is exploding. For Sophie Decock, Country Manager, VMware Belgium & Luxembourg, the situation is not surprising: the use of modern applications – which by definition require a hybrid multi-cloud environment and flexibility – has become widespread to meet new consumer expectations.

In theory, this variety of available options should be able to satisfy every business need and bypass the well-known cloud difficulties. However, many companies are still suffering from the consequences of past choices, without clear management or support, and the ensuing complexity.

“As Sylvain Rouri, Chief Sales Officer OVHcloud quite rightly says, faced with too much complexity, administrators risk losing control of their business! To regain that control, they need to make the cloud more transparent. It is also important to develop and put in place certain things, which will be possible to undo if necessary, and to allow roaming between clouds … Currently, companies and their IT teams are trying to find the right way to ‘’perfect balance between control and choice.”

Apps are leading the way

For Sophie Decock, modern applications are taking the upper hand over traditional ones, allowing companies to adopt changes that will enhance their business success. Together with their IT teams, they should quickly decide how to harness this innovation without increasing risks and uncertainties.

“The solution is in the cloud … the best option for modernizing applications!” In many businesses, however, the ability to innovate and modernize with the cloud is hampered by the complexity of the processes. “The pace of modernizing their applications, migrating to the cloud and developing the experiences that end users demand is slowing down,” says Sophie Decock. This situation also compartmentalizes administration and security. And, ultimately, creates complexity at the ends – the famous edge, making life difficult for the IT teams … “

Conclusion: the manual resolution of these problems by IT teams would be too time consuming and far too expensive to solve. So, companies have to make a decision. For the VMware representative, opting for a multi-cloud strategy allows their IT teams to reduce complexity. This type of environment also offers more consistency and flexibility.

One cloud provider? Unrealistic!

“Wherever you are, a hybrid multi-cloud gives you a cohesive infrastructure, which extends a modern cloud infrastructure to thousands of other potential cloud partners. It also ensures operational consistency through uniform administration and security, which increases flexibility, eliminates complexity and protects you from the risk of cloud lock-in.”

Of course, each cloud provider has their own IT tools, provisioning portals, administration software, and monitoring options that work perfectly within their cloud environment. Having a single cloud provider makes it easy. “At least in theory,” comments Sophie Decock. In practice, today it is no longer realistic to use a single cloud provider for the entire infrastructure. Each cloud has its own unique characteristics. And every company has its reasons for using it, whether they are technical, economic, geographic or regulatory. According to Forrester, businesses will use an average of 8.7 public clouds in 2023!”

One management platform, yes!

With so many clouds, it’s easy to understand the importance of a strategic approach focused on the role each environment plays in achieving business results. Without this approach, IT departments would need a dedicated team for each cloud in the enterprise. A situation far from realistic in view of the costs and the number of competent people that would have to be hired. But when faced with a single cloud management platform, the IT teams have to use only one set of tools to manage all the clouds in the enterprise. This approach reduces complexity, simplifies administration, and enables changes to be made in cloud environments on time.

“We have seen and continue to see that many of our customers who are moving quickly to the cloud are surprised to see its volume grow faster than expected,” says Sophie Decock. The use is then more intensive, and the costs higher than expected. These companies need to be able to reverse their decisions and move workloads to and from the cloud, as needed. A cohesive approach to the cloud allows IT teams to add a fixed policy of security, latency, and governance to a workload, whether the workload migrates to a public or private cloud environment or remains on-premises, and in such a manner. that the affected application or workload performs optimally where it is hosted. ”

Less energy spent, more availability

The practical benefits of this coherent strategy allow companies, among other things, a smooth use of the cloud and the possibility of modernization of applications. But the operational benefits are also significant for IT departments. The freedom to move existing applications to the cloud of their choice and to use their own cloud services eliminates the need to upkeep old applications. As a result, businesses save themselves the problems associated with systems crashing on other platforms.

This portability also allows IT teams to provide better services, since they no longer have to worry about this part of the application and can focus on support, such as back-up services, network, security, governance, etc.

“A multi-cloud strategy paves the way for consistency and simplicity, for the benefit of companies and their IT services, both from a technical and commercial point of view as well as from a strategic point of view,” says Sophie Decock. This acceleration in the possibilities of the cloud and the impact it will have on modernizing applications is among the few positive advances of the past year. It is up to us to continue in this direction. The cloud should not be seen as an optional trend, but as a tool to be monitored and continuously improved. A trend that gives you total freedom of choice, without restrictions. ”