Cloud Computing Now IT’s Default Tech — Are You in the Game?
This week’s cloud news roundup also features takeaways from Prosimo, Google Cloud and NetApp.
![Cloud Cloud](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltc32808962ee59d8f/6524040e20b29ba779326801/Cloud.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
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Digital transformation appears to be front and center for organizations, after years of talk. According to Foundry’s 2022 Cloud Computing Survey, IT decision-makers now default to cloud services when upgrading or buying new technology. (Recall that IDG Communications, which has released this same report for the last nine years, is now Foundry.)
The main reason is pretty obvious: The impact of an unexpected pandemic two years ago that shut down the globe. Organizations were forced to adopt cloud computing to support remote employees and other operations. To that point, Foundry found that businesses now cite five top objectives for deploying cloud. Those are:
1. To enable disaster recovery and business continuity (40%).
2. To replace legacy, on-premises technology (39%).
3. To reduce total cost of ownership (34%).
4. To improve employee productivity (33%).
5. To create greater ability to react to changing market conditions (32%).
“The rapid digitization that has taken place over the past two years continues to move forward and cloud adoption is a major component,” said Stacey Raap, marketing and research manager at Foundry. “[C]loud adoption will continue to accelerate, but not without challenges that must be addressed along the way.”
For more stats, click to the next slide.
More than two-thirds (69%) of people responding to Foundry’s survey agree that their organization has accelerated cloud migration over the past year. Enterprises took the most action, at 76%, while SMBs reported momentum, at 64%. That’s no surprise given the variance in budgets and the number of employees to support.
More than one-half of IT decision-makers primarily implemented SaaS (52%), followed by PaaS (38%), security as a service (37%), IaaS (36%) and cloud analytics (33%).
Finally, over the next year and a half, respondents expect to adopt more cloud computing. Almost half (46%) say their organization’s total IT environment will consist mostly of cloud with some on-premises infrastructure, while 17% say they will be all-cloud.
When it comes to cloud computing, enterprises have led the way, and continue to do so. They simply have more money, more people and more impetus than most of their smaller counterparts. That said, SMBs are catching up.
“As more organizations move their organizations toward fully being in the cloud, IT teams will need the proper talent and resources to manage their cloud infrastructure and overcome any security and privacy hurdles that come with being in the cloud,” Foundry’s Raap said.
Keeping in mind the ongoing IT talent shortage, channel partners will remain more critical than ever to SMBs’ cloud computing success. Here’s where they appear to need the most help:
• Controlling cloud costs (36% of all respondents).
• Ensuring data privacy and security (35% of all respondents).
• Dealing with a lack of cloud security skills/expertise (34% of all respondents).
Prosimo, the company launched last year by Viptela’s co-founders, this week introduced new features to its Application eXperience Infrastructure (AXI) platform. (Read this article by Channel Futures’ James Anderson for deep exploration into Prosimo’s business model and relevance to partners.) The company bills the product as “a full-stack cloud transit to power the enterprise multicloud.” We asked Mehul Patel, head of customer insight and intelligence at Prosimo, what that means.
“When we use the term ‘full-stack,’ it refers to a consistent architecture that reduces complexity, regardless of location or region, when connecting applications, services and networks in the cloud while addressing operations, security and performance requirements,” Patel said.
Patel noted that IaaS, PaaS and apps endpoints all need to communicate at various levels.
“The IaaS apps running in VPC or VNET need connecting, securing and optimizing at the network layer. PaaS or serverless can only be attached using the application layer using Fully Qualified Domain Names. However, this greatly increases operating complexity as enterprises move across other clouds and regions. Prosimo’s Network Transit and App Transit are the core building blocks that provide enterprises with a full-stack cloud transit, basically a single architecture that simplifies and automates multicloud.”
But what makes this offering unique? Find out what Patel has to say on the next slide.
Again, here’s Prosimo’s Mehul Patel answering Channel Futures’ inquiry about the uniqueness of the AXI platform.
“The differentiating factor of Prosimo is its use of machine learning and ML-generated recommendations,” Patel said.
He said Prosimo’s CIRRUS ML engine provides the following recommendations based on what it learns:
• Cost and performance optimization.
• Dynamic user risk score.
• Infrastructure expansion based on user access.
“Specifically, Prosimo added deeper ML-driven insights,” he said. “Now enterprises can overlay real-time and historical views across any transit element to identify trends, usage patterns and sprawling cloud costs to make intelligent infrastructure decisions. Autonomous multicloud networking allows enterprises to build a ‘cloud interconnect’ that supports IaaS, PaaS and application endpoints connectivity needs across the enterprise cloud.”
Prosimo works with resellers, systems integrators, managed service providers and referral partners. So what does this new platform mean for them? Click to the next slide.
We asked Timo Prietto, head of global alliances and partnerships at Prosimo, to discuss which partner type is best suited to provision the AXI platform.
“Our platform lends itself to both resale and managed services opportunities equally,” Prietto said.
In terms of the reason why, Prietto pointed to one of the main features of AXI: Cloud Asset Discovery. This tool uncovers an organization’s cloud assets, lets users onboard more assets with a single click (according to Prosimo) and creates network transit for hybrid, interregion, and cross-cloud with segmentation. That capability alone “solves a critical issue for many service providers,” Prietto said (referring to MSPs, not telcos).
“Many customers struggle to keep track of what applications, PaaS, SaaS and other native services are running in their cloud — particularly in multiregion or multicloud environments. This knowledge gap makes it difficult for service providers to efficiently manage their customers’ cloud assets. Cloud Asset Discovery removes that challenge and gives [channel partners] a valuable tool to gain critical knowledge about their customer’s environment.”
Compensation comes in the form of margins.
The biggest cloud news so far this week has come out of Google Cloud. The world’s third-largest public cloud provider held its Data Cloud Summit this week and, as part of that event, announced its new Data Cloud Alliance.
As we wrote previously, founding members include Google Cloud, Accenture, Confluent, Databricks, Dataiku, Deloitte, Elastic, Fivetran, MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis and Starburst. Together they aim to “make data more portable and accessible across disparate business systems, platforms, and environments — with a goal of ensuring that access to data is never a barrier to digital transformation.”
Google Cloud says that will happen as member companies provide APIs and integration support for data portability and accessibility, regardless of where that information resides. Look, too, for the Alliance to develop “new, common industry data models, processes and platform integrations to increase data portability and reduce complexity associated with data governance and global compliance,” Google Cloud said this week.
Note that Alliance members are not so much rivals as companies that offer complementary services. Many are vendors that sell through the indirect channel, while others (i.e., Accenture, Deloitte) are channel partners themselves (albeit sort of also vendors). How the Alliance’s efforts will filter down to smaller MSPs, resellers and the like remains to be seen.
NetApp announced on April 7 that it is buying Instaclustr. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed.
Instaclustr delivers data-layer-as-a-service solutions. NetApp intends to use those capabilities to create “a cloud operations platform that provides the best and most optimized foundation for … applications in the public clouds and on-premises,” per a statement from NetAPP CEO George Kurian.
NetApp will use Instaclustr to target enterprises that use apps in the public cloud or on-premises. Combining the two companies’ platforms will allow users to reduce cloud complexity “while eliminating vendor lock-in risks and the high costs of building and maintaining that same expertise internally,” said Ben Bromhead, CTO and co-founder at Instaclustr.
NetApp will fold Instaclustr into its Spot by NetApp portfolio, which offers cloud cost control and optimization. CloudCheckr, of course, now lives in that same group.
NetApp sells through the channel.
NetApp announced on April 7 that it is buying Instaclustr. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed.
Instaclustr delivers data-layer-as-a-service solutions. NetApp intends to use those capabilities to create “a cloud operations platform that provides the best and most optimized foundation for … applications in the public clouds and on-premises,” per a statement from NetAPP CEO George Kurian.
NetApp will use Instaclustr to target enterprises that use apps in the public cloud or on-premises. Combining the two companies’ platforms will allow users to reduce cloud complexity “while eliminating vendor lock-in risks and the high costs of building and maintaining that same expertise internally,” said Ben Bromhead, CTO and co-founder at Instaclustr.
NetApp will fold Instaclustr into its Spot by NetApp portfolio, which offers cloud cost control and optimization. CloudCheckr, of course, now lives in that same group.
NetApp sells through the channel.
Cloud computing is turning into the most in-demand technology, in all its different facets. Think SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, everything as a service. New research from Foundry (formerly IDG Communications) highlights the momentum organizations are undergoing as they adopt more cloud services and infrastructure. Partners will want to take note of the end-user demand, given the channel’s growing involvement in guiding, deploying and managing customers’ cloud environments. (We’ll be talking about cloud computing opportunities for smaller partners, April 11-14, at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo.)
Along similar lines, Prosimo, a vendor built by Viptela’s cofounders, has a new cloud computing platform partners will want to investigate. It’s geared toward resellers and managed services providers.
Next up, you probably know that Google Cloud is a founding member of the new Data Cloud Alliance. We covered that a couple days ago but here we offer a few more details. Channel partners should benefit, albeit in a trickle-down kind of way.
Finally, NetApp, which bought CloudCheckr, just announced another acquisition. FInd out which cloud computing company it’s buying to add to its Spot by NetApp portfolio (where CloudCheckr now resides).
It’s all in the slideshow above.
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