Hybrid Cloud, Multicloud Domination: What Happened in 2019, What the Channel Can Expect
Get the skinny on two of the hottest cloud topics of the year.
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Hybrid cloud adoption will only pick up the pace, Gartner’s Santhosh Rao, senior director analyst, said earlier this year at the research firm’s symposium in Dubai. That’s because hybrid cloud offers the best way to get the most of cost, agility, flexibility, scalability, elasticity, compliance, security and reliability.
“Hybrid architectures will become the footprints that enable organizations to extend beyond their data centers and into cloud services across multiple platforms,” Rao said.
The second Enterprise Cloud Index survey from Nutanix, whose software unites public, private and distributed clouds, supports those assertions: Nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents said they are moving some applications off the public cloud and back on premises, with 22% of those users moving five or more applications. Why? Mainly because hybrid cloud can prove less expensive than public or premises-only platforms, as well as more secure. More than a quarter of respondents (28%) chose the hybrid model as the most secure — substantially surpassing those who chose a fully private cloud/on-premises model (21%) and more than twice as many as those who chose traditional (non-cloud-enabled) private data centers (13%).
Similarly, the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud report that Flexera released earlier this year found that 58% of businesses chose hybrid cloud in 2019, up from 51% in 2018.
The top public cloud vendors have taken heed, responding to enterprise demand for options that combine public and on-premises cloud options. Click ahead for insight into AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Dell Technologies Cloud.
Perhaps the biggest hybrid cloud news of the year came from Amazon Web Services when it at last released its long-discussed Outposts platform. The solution combines onsite networking, compute and storage with managed services. For enterprises, Outposts offers an alternative from the world’s largest provider of public cloud. For AWS, Outposts creates another revenue stream, including channel partner opportunity. Analysts at Canalys Research said in October they expect AWS to be a top four on-premises server vendor in the United States and Europe within three years – and that partners will play a critical role in Outposts deployments.
In addition to enabling a more simplified approach to managing and operating Azure data services in hybrid scenarios, Azure Arc aims to let partners deploy and manage solutions in multicloud environments using a variety of Kubernetes orchestration tools.
Microsoft said in November at its annual Ignite event that Azure Arc’s first deliverable will come in the form of Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale, available now in preview.
“Azure Arc really marks the beginning of this new era of hybrid computing, where there is a control plane built for multicloud, multi-edge,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during his opening keynote at Ignite. “And not only that, but we for the first time support managed data services to be anywhere your compute is.”
Google Cloud Platform’s Anthos technology started as a hybrid solution but also extends into multicloud. Google plans to enable Anthos to work with Kubernetes services from competing clouds including AWS and Microsoft Azure. The multicloud capability Google is planning is possible as an outgrowth of the near ubiquitous industry support among application developers and platform providers for Kubernetes. Anthos by itself isn’t multicloud-capable. Google’s new Anthos Migrate will provide that capability by enabling automated migrations into containers that can run in Google Kubernetes Engine from virtual machines running on-premises or in other clouds.
VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is Dell’s answer to the hybrid cloud. The offering pairs Dell EMC’s VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure with VMware’s cloud software and resides in the enterprise’s data center or edge location. It’s very similar to what Amazon Web Services has structured with Outposts — except Dell has more extensive experience and knowledge operating within customers’ walls. In turn, partners can expect details on tools and support some time in the new year.
“Partners are central to everything we do,” Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of Dell Technologies, told Channel Futures. “We’re trying to make sure we get the partner program really well thought out.”
More enterprises are using more than one public cloud platform.
“Multicloud is no longer a matter of ‘if’ — it’s a matter of ‘when,’” said Gartner’s Rao. “Multicloud computing lowers the risk of cloud provider lock-in, and can provide service resiliency and migration opportunities, in addition to the core cloud benefits of agility, scalability and elasticity.”
Remember that RightScale cloud report from Flexera? That study found that 84% of organizations are embracing multicloud. A10 Networks uncovered similar findings with the help of Business Performance Innovation Network. According to that report, two-thirds of respondent companies have deployed applications across two or more public clouds. Finally, Gartner says 81% of enterprises surveyed earlier in 2019 work with two or more public cloud providers.
“Most organizations adopt a multicloud strategy out of a desire to avoid vendor lock-in or to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions,” said Michael Warrilow, vice president analyst at Gartner. “We expect that most large organizations will continue to willfully pursue this approach.”
Along those lines, 83% of respondents in the Turbonomic’s 2019 State of Multicloud report said they think workloads will move freely among clouds. The greatest challenges, not surprisingly, are ensuring security, and applications and data portability.
Research firm Canalys says all the cloud activity presents prime opportunity for partners throughout the indirect channel. Balancing all the options “creates a huge demand for channel partners to provide consulting, migration, integration and management services across multiple platforms,” said Daniel Liu, research analyst at Canalys.
“The channel is becoming a new catalyst for continued growth for hyperscale cloud service providers, particularly as competition intensifies,” Lu said.
Research firm Canalys says all the cloud activity presents prime opportunity for partners throughout the indirect channel. Balancing all the options “creates a huge demand for channel partners to provide consulting, migration, integration and management services across multiple platforms,” said Daniel Liu, research analyst at Canalys.
“The channel is becoming a new catalyst for continued growth for hyperscale cloud service providers, particularly as competition intensifies,” Lu said.
Talk of hybrid cloud and multicloud ran rampant in 2019, and for good reason. Each configuration offers organizations important options for their computing needs — and as public-cloud-only setups proved insufficient mostly because of cost and security, more enterprises adopted hybrid cloud (on-premises/public and private cloud pairings) to give themselves more flexibility and assurances.
Organizations also understood the importance of teaming with more than one public cloud vendor to ensure redundancy, compliance and other important requirements. Thus, talk of “multicloud” took off in 2019, too.
The slideshow above reviews some of the biggest hybrid cloud and multicloud developments of the year and provides guidance to channel partners.
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