Multi-cloud adoption and consumption trends

Business appetite for cloud continues unabated, with most companies now relying on multiple clouds.

At midpoint 2021, 73% of surveyed enterprises said they were using two public clouds, and 26% were using three or more. But multi-cloud for most means managing public cloud consumption along with a mix that can include private clouds, on-premises assets, and edge clouds.

Organizations currently leveraging multi-cloud reported the following benefits from their most recent digital initiative:

• 42% faster time to release applications, resulting in 35% more revenue
• 41% lower costs and fewer hours spent on IT infrastructure and security incidents
• 35% savings in productivity across a distributed workforce

In some cases, companies were forced to accelerate cloud.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed many organizations to confront their legacy technology burden sooner than expected,” InfoWorld observes. “However, getting old systems to the cloud doesn’t happen overnight.”

Many organizations are pulled along by notable success stories, such as how Brazilian customer experience company LIQ, with 600 servers, migrated 80% of its business application environments and 50% of its informational environments in just 3 months with Google Cloud VMware Engine. Or how European PVC manufacturer Kem One within months was able to migrate its previous two-data-center infrastructure to public cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS with less than 15 minutes of downtime for its 900 SAP ERP users.

But as BCG analysts note, “In this fast-growing market, clarity on what constitutes an efficient and effective multi-cloud approach is hard to come by. One reason is that companies have followed multiple paths to mainstream adoption.”

Multi-cloud can come with its own set of technology issues that often lead to replicating the complexities and siloed technologies of legacy IT that businesses hope to avoid with cloud.

Too many organizations are adopting multi-cloud without sufficient visibility into—and management of—an environment that spans compute, network, storage, and operating environments across multiple clouds and traditional and cloud-native applications.

Developers may be utilizing unique interfaces and APIs for each cloud. Operations teams often struggle to rationalize fragmented infrastructure. And organizations can quickly find that instead of consuming cloud rationally, they are being consumed by cloud.

To unlock the full value of multi-cloud, businesses need consistency and control across clouds. That requires modern, comprehensive, multi-cloud management to ensure consistency in managing all types of clouds and the ability to adapt, respond, and innovate on the fly.

VMware’s approach aims to bring solution choice and consumption flexibility across hybrid, private, edge, and public cloud environments. VMware Cloud Universal offers a flexible multi-cloud subscription purchase and consumption approach to manage cost, resource utilization, compliance, and ongoing operations across any cloud and on-premises environments. 

“Consumption planning is essential in a subscription-based cloud operating model for financial forecasting, capacity planning, asset utilization, and performance benchmarking of actual to planned business outcomes,”  says Dee-Dee Atta, Group Product Marketing Manager for VMware Cloud Universal. “We believe that two success factors for multi-cloud lie in unifying the control plane and integrating proactive consumption planning.”   

With VMware Cloud Universal, customers also can take advantage of VMware Success 360. That comprehensive customer success offering capitalizes on VMware expertise for planning and adopting VMware investments across the transformation journey, including consumption strategies, business outcome workshops, and other services.

To find out how VMware Cloud Universal can help you succeed at all phases of multi-cloud adoption, go to https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-universal.html.