Amir Khan is founder & CEO at Alkira, the industry’s first on-demand, as-a-service, unified multi-cloud networking service.
There’s a concept gaining significant momentum in cloud networking: the “supercloud.”
To understand the supercloud and its potential value, you need to understand the benefits and challenges of multi-cloud deployments. The supercloud, when approached strategically, can help organizations mitigate the difficult parts of a multi-cloud environment and make it easier for them to capitalize on the business benefits.
The Supercloud: Unlocking The Benefits Of Multi-Cloud Environments
You’d be hard-pressed to find a single major enterprise that isn’t employing at least one public cloud service. There are mountains of data that illustrate this trajectory. For example, Gartner forecast that “worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 21.7% to total $597.3 billion in 2023, up from $491 billion in 2022.”
As public cloud adoption continues to surge, so too does multi-cloud adoption. According to one survey, 87% of respondents reported having a multi-cloud strategy, and 72% are taking a hybrid approach by combining the use of both public and private clouds.
A multi-cloud strategy can offer tremendous business benefits. It allows organizations to optimize their cloud spend, leverage the best services in each cloud, build better business resiliency via redundancy and avoid vendor lock-in. However, multi-cloud deployments also come with many challenges. These environments are complex, highly distributed and spread across wide geographies.
This complexity makes it difficult to grow, operate and manage these deployments in every capacity. Essential, day-to-day cloud tasks—such as creating cloud on-ramps, connecting apps and users, configuring apps, provisioning users and setting security policies—become very difficult to execute.
Enterprises typically rely on cloud architects and network engineers to do this work manually. For a moderately sized, single-cloud environment, this may work well. However, with large, multi-cloud environments, organizations may run into a major skills shortage. To manage multi-cloud deployments traditionally, organizations need experts focused on each of the major clouds—that means AWS specialists, Azure specialists and GCP specialists. Still, I’ve found that even leading Fortune 500 businesses find it difficult to hire and retain enough IT staff specialized in each of these clouds.
This makes things complicated for enterprises looking to design, deploy and manage new clouds and sites. Enterprises of all sizes that are interested in adding a new cloud to a multi-cloud environment can be looking at a long, painful process that requires many months and several resources to complete. All of this time and effort can put a strain on an organization, making it difficult to keep up with the pace of business today.
Understanding How The Supercloud Works
The supercloud was first discussed by researchers at Cornell, though Deloitte helped popularize the term. It acts as an umbrella that sits over all the disparate deployments in an organization’s multi-cloud environment. It’s an abstraction layer that glues an organization’s various cloud infrastructures together to achieve a seamless experience for IT and end users. This layer masks all the complexity of the underlying clouds, so things like deploying firewalls or connecting apps can be done automatically, on-demand and across all cloud sites at once.
By unifying these disparate cloud environments, the supercloud aims to unlock a range of advantages. Organizations can gain newfound flexibility, allowing them to leverage the best-in-breed services from various cloud providers to suit their specific needs. This can also help eliminate vendor lock-in, which is a major concern in the traditional multi-cloud approach.
Additionally, the supercloud can enhance security by providing a single pane of glass for managing access and compliance across the entire cloud ecosystem. This centralized control can help reduce the risk of security breaches and simplify audits. Furthermore, the supercloud can empower organizations to optimize cloud costs by providing a holistic view of resource utilization across all platforms.
Potential Supercloud Challenges
While all superclouds share certain traits, not all superclouds are created equally. With some superclouds, users may encounter complexities during platform integration with public cloud providers, which can impact how smooth a deployment is as well as its productivity. Some superclouds also have a steep learning curve due to comprehensive feature sets, which can be particularly pronounced if there’s limited vendor support. This can necessitate additional training and resources for IT teams, which already tend to be spread thin.
On top of these challenges, there’s also a sliding scale between different superclouds when it comes to automation. While some superclouds may offer automation capabilities, this can come at vastly different maturity levels and may require further refinement and expansion in specific areas. Superclouds that put the majority of the onus on the user to figure things out themselves can make it extremely challenging for them to succeed.
Simplicity: A Driver For Greater Business Value
Multi-cloud deployments can offer organizations considerable business value, but the complexity inherent in these environments has made it difficult for enterprises to fully realize this value. When the potential challenges are understood and addressed, the supercloud can be an effective approach to solving those problems.
In an upcoming article, I’ll look closer at how the supercloud can enhance network security and reliability as well as the challenges of implementing and maintaining a supercloud.
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