Cloud-centric infrastructure is the foundation for digital transformation and resilience against macroeconomic dynamics. It is no surprise that accelerated adoption of cloud-related technologies is consistently ranked as a top C-suite priority in the post-pandemic world. But there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to cloud.

IDC’s Future of Digital Infrastructure research shows that an overwhelming majority of enterprises rely on a mix of physical and virtual systems, deployed across dedicated and shared environments, including public and private clouds, as well as edge locations and traditional on-premises, hosted and co-located datacentres. In Europe alone, hybrid and multicloud environments are a reality for 79% of organisations and underpin their ability to navigate through digital pressures and macroeconomic crises. IDC’s European Multicloud Survey, conducted in September 2022, shows that 35% of organisations take a balanced approach to investing in on-premises and public cloud environments. A further 52% say they are more likely to invest in on-premises environments.

These considerations are driven primarily by strict European regulations, but also by cost, security and performance requirements of workloads.

As technology investments become tightly connected to business value, many European organisations are now developing a fresh approach towards their hybrid and multicloud environments. They are proactively moving beyond siloed and accidental hybrid and multicloud architectures and are investing to:

• Strategically align infrastructure KPIs to key business outcomes
• Adopt a workload-defined infrastructure strategy
• Modernise on-premises environments with cloud-native capabilities such as containers, open architectures and microservices to enable workload portability • Adopt software-defined automation and orchestration for modern operations and self-service controls, enabled with analytics
• Prioritise consistent management, security and compliance policies to ensure resilience and availability Invest in consistent data management and governance to meet European regulations and data management requirements such as digital sovereignty
• Prioritise modern infrastructure capabilities for all workloads including “crown jewel” applications that rely heavily on on-premises environments
• Ensure continuous optimisation and efficiency of all infrastructure in hybrid cloud environments

These priorities are aimed at modernising on-premises environments, which, in turn, will result in a resilient, governed and optimised hybrid cloud.

Core datacentres are here to stay. European organisations expect to spend 44% of infrastructure budget on core and secondary datacentres by 2024, similar to the 45% in 2022, according to the 2022 multicloud survey.

For most organisations, datacentre environments also host a majority of workloads, including core, business-critical workloads. They are capitalising on the on-premises management skills and investments to extend to the external infrastructures, thereby maintaining IT control and autonomy.

Given the application gravity and governance complexities, datacentres can be the starting point for hybrid and multicloud. Organisations developing an insideout hybrid cloud control strategy need to capitalise on existing IT operational skills and technologies to extend it to cover full hybrid cloud operations. This can help manage, govern and optimise it with faster time to value.

• Overcome management complexities
• Bring standardisation, automation and consistency
• Improve cloud optimisation
• Gain better control over strategic workloads, apps and data
• Balance innovation and governance

By 2026, 90% of G2000 CIOs will use intelligent operations for automation for resilience and agility and to meet the cost and performance needs of workloads. This need not be overwhelming for those that embrace a cloud control plane from familiar territory — the datacentre or private cloud.

Having a hybrid control plane can enable unified visibility, security and performance across resources while addressing concerns related to data location, compliance, cost and latency — a top priority for European organisations. The resulting seamless operational control plane increases the strategic importance of the cloud environment and IT teams.

Cloud assessment and optimisation allows you to review your cloud environments against best practice.

Get tailored insights on how to improve your cloud strategy! Mandre Stander at CoCre8 on +27 11 012 1500 

Email mandre.stander@cocre8.com