What a difference a decade makes. It’s been more than 10 years since the advent of cloud computing. The technology first used by tech companies — primarily for development and testing — is now handling global production workloads. And multi-cloud success changes the way nearly every business and government operates.
The State of Multi-Cloud Today
Enterprises adopting public, hybrid and multi-cloud need agility and innovation. Instead, they’re discovering complexity, largely because of three things:
- Pace of change: Cloud is a fundamental, rapid shift in architecture. Monthly upgrades, for example, could be a 5- or 6-fold increase from the previous norm.
- Distributed management of cloud: Cloud services are often adopted
from the “outside in” by lines of business, before or outside of IT, creating decentralized management needs that increase risk, especially at scale. - Pervasive multi-cloud: New SaaS products seemingly come to market every day, and CIOs need to support a rapidly expanding cloud portfolio.
A New Cloud Operational Model for the Journey from Basecamp
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Over time, the four phases of a successful multi-cloud journey include:[/caption]
- Cost and availability
- Governance and security
- Automation
- Service integration
Enterprises Join the Climb
Leading cloud communications platform provider 8x8 leverages multi-cloud management solutions from VMware for automation and service integration. The company’s journey has resulted in 1,000 microservices in production.
We saved a little more than $1 million in the last six months.
Dejan Deklich, Chief Product Officer, 8x8
“One platform has to support all of our customers — big enterprises and small businesses,” explains Dejan Deklich, 8x8 chief product officer. A key multi-cloud management platform capability is reservation management: This enables enterprises to pre-arrange capacity to get the most out of their cloud budget. That alone can significantly reduce costs every month.
“We run [VMware Tanzu Observability by] Wavefront everywhere, too,” says Deklich. That’s because his company needed a solution that would scale for all its products, services and infrastructure. The solution provides enterprise observability for the full production stack.
According to Deklich, it's “the only true enterprise-scale observability and analytics platform in the metrics space. We ended up instrumenting all microservices, all VMs, all containers — all the infrastructure that we could with Wavefront. Now we are talking about instrumenting all the business processes with it, including support.”
[Tanzu Observability] eliminates two of my major pet peeves: finger-pointing across teams — engineering, operations and QA — and wasted debugging time. This matters to me a lot.
Dejan Deklich, Chief Product Officer, 8x8
Getting to the Peak
The vision of multi-cloud management is to:
- Take customers from a world of relying exclusively on people and tools, to a world in which they can count on smart software that continually optimizes based on business goals.
- Move customers from a world in which they take great risks every day, into one where they can run at cloud speed with integrity and confidence.
- Take customers from the challenges of multiple disconnected environments — multiple hybrid clouds, multiple public clouds and rich SaaS portfolios — to a world in which one suite of integrated products gives them the efficiency to scale with cloud.
- Move customers from struggling to keep up, to a world of simplified cloud governance.
Multi-cloud success requires two things:
- Superior products, purpose-built for cloud that advance customers’ multi-cloud journey.
- A superior partner that understands enterprise challenges and what’s required to scale.