By Ahmed Auda, Vice President and General Manager, Middle East, Turkey, and North Africa, VMware
The benefits of using technology to innovate and get ahead of the competition are clear, but despite this, few organisations have yet to truly harness the potential of their data. According to 100 C-suite executives in Forbes Top 2000 companies, surveyed by VMware, nearly three-quarters (70%) of businesses admitted they are struggling to unlock the value of their data – directly impacting their ability to innovate.
Organisations looking to close the gap between originating ideas and delivering them into the business by doing more with their data, should turn their attention to the cloud.
Here are seven ways multi-cloud can help close the innovation-gap – by helping businesses move, store, utilise and thus monetise their data, irrespective of where it resides.
- Ease of management: As customers embrace the multi-cloud model, they discover that greater choice can lead to a big spike in complexity. Businesses on this cloud journey need to move from being ‘cloud first’ – with a big focus on building customer-facing apps in a single cloud – to ‘cloud smart’- where they have the freedom to choose the best cloud environments for their applications, with consistent management for security and control, and a cost-efficient use of private and public clouds.
- Freedom of choice: Organisations don’t want to have to plan their entire cloud/IT/digital journey upfront; they want the freedom to adapt as their business needs evolve. That means having the freedom to adjust data utilisation as required rather having to compromise on decision making by being locked into one cloud. A true multi-cloud strategy enables companies to incorporate the right mix of on-premises, private, public and edge cloud environments to meet their needs.
- Agility: As part of that freedom to choose any cloud, organisations should be able to move both new and existing apps quickly and easily to a cloud, with zero or minimal refactoring. Requirements and services are continuously evolving, and a company’s multi-cloud infrastructure must be able to evolve as well. This also reduces friction linked to the migration of data, allowing the agility required to access and use data flexibly, and at speed.
- Time to value: The nature of business today means workloads must be up and running on any cloud quickly and easily. Being locked into a multi-year contract with a cloud provider and not consuming resources in the way they anticipated, hampers the ability of the business to move quickly. Instead, organisations should be able to consume cloud at the right pace to meet their spend commitment, avoiding wasted expenditure and allowing them to tap into required data sets when needed.
- Security: Security is a top priority for businesses. Being able to proactively monitor, detect and remediate security across clouds is critical. It should be baked into the platforms that organisations are using in a way that ensures upgrades happen on time, with support to minimise disruption in the event of an attack. This directly ties into the uptime and resilience required to manage data effectively, across workloads and at all times.
- Sovereignty: The distribution and storage of data between organisations and beyond national boundaries has become an obstacle to its protection and utilisation. Having access to a sovereign cloud can provide the guarantees and assurances around these legal requirements, opening up the possibilities of innovation to entire industries that previously had no access to cloud services.
- Futureproofing: No-one knows what new innovation the future will bring, not even two or three years ahead. Businesses need to be agile to respond to evolving opportunities and new challenges. With a multi-cloud platform, they will be equipped to adapt every part of their organisation as needed, including tech infrastructure and data management capacities, to have those same capabilities.
By deploying a multi-cloud approach, organisations can give themselves the foundations they need to make better use of their data today, and for what’s around the corner, and in doing so, finally close the innovation-execution gap.
