Investment in cloud infrastructure is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in spending worldwide by 2027 according to Gartner, yet analysts claim over 40 percent of enterprises’ multi-cloud expectations will be unachievable by that time frame.
Gartner VP analyst Michael Warillow says that this is an optimistic view. “ The reality today is that three-quarters of all organizations have adopted multiple cloud infrastructures, you might hear that called multi-cloud. The reasons that organizations have gotten to multi-cloud differ significantly with some by design and others by accident. The net effect has been for most, that they continue to have silos of cloud adoption based on particular technology providers, different cloud providers and the skill sets aren't growing to provide a more integrated set of operational processes and management and administration.”
In looking to the next few years of cloud infrastructure deployments, one of the chief challenges to be addressed is the idea of a decentralized cloud. “Everyone is investing to make public cloud services available closer to their customer's data centre and on-premise environments.
So there are a couple of key benefits of distributed cloud that overcome obstacles for greater adoption of public cloud. Some of them are technical and in a country like Australia, you can't go past latency. In the Australian environment, we are such a big country, uh, and the concentration on the east coast means that's where the public clouds are,” he says.
For remote environments, the increasing availability of low earth orbit technologies is going to be a game changer in terms of better balance between the metropolitan areas and the bush. And despite the appeal of distributed cloud, Warrilow says that the jury's still out on how widely it's going to be adopted.
Vertel Commercial Director Tony Hudson predicts that while cloud migration is now unstoppable, there is still a major chunk of the market, that has not yet either fully moved or even started to move to the cloud.
“No matter how good that cloud provider is, they should be looking to move to a multi-cloud environment. And the technical challenge that goes with a multi-cloud environment is more than just ensuring there is an alternate cloud provider environment, it's actually more critical to be saying, how do I do a fast switchover so that my organization or my clients see next to no impact?.”
He says the key message we can glean from recent security breaches is that, organizations should not put all their eggs in one basket with a single cloud provider.
Invariably there will be a challenge for organizations in consideration of having a mix of public and private cloud, operations and where do you draw the boundaries on what should be.
Security and compliance will continue to be core to the resilience of all cloud infrastructure projects.
“CIOs tell Gartner every day the importance of cyber security as you know, a factor in all of their decision making. It sounds cliche, but it is one of those areas that does keep CIOs up at night. It's also now a board issue where the impact of the whole organization is at risk.
We've seen that in recent examples, Medibank Private and Optus and so forth. The bottom line though is that cloud can be and will be as secure or more secure than traditional on-premises computing infrastructure. It's a matter of how organizations use cloud and making sure, making sure that they use it secure,” Warrilow states.
He adds that given some of these recent cybersecurity events that have happened that are known and some not publicly known there's “a potentially knee-jerk response to increase the regulatory and legislative mandates.”
Which he views will be a major increasing burden for many organizations to comply with. Ben Jones, MD of Continuum Cyber agrees that privacy concerns on our doorstep are creating a defining moment for the centrality of cloud infrastructure.
“When we talk about migration to the cloud, or moving our legacy systems, whatever time you think it's going to take- double it- because invariably the vendor will tell you that it's going to be a seamless transition to move your business into some cloud architecture from maybe an existing legacy solution,” he cautions. Particularly when taking cybersecurity into account.
“So what have we got? Three years? So 36 months. Let's have a look at the last two. Think about where we were in the end of August before eveything happened in terms of the general ways that people had our cybersecurity. When Optus happened that really moved the needle. Two things happened. I think number one, Claire O'Neil came in who inherited that portfolio and was straight on the front foot. That got us talking then that was followed by Medibank, which is getting worse by the day. , it's totally changed in these two months,” he warns.
Accelerating momentum on how to defend and protect cloud systems and training the personnel that govern them need to be paramount on the next three years.
“Obviously these last couple of months when we've had sort of, you know, the greatest hits of hacking of all time. We've had very complex systems compromised, but none of these attacks were very sophisticated. This is not, deep, espionage, high-level hacking. Cybersecurity cloud guys have got to get it right every single time. While the bad guy only has to get it right once.”
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