The demand for public cloud services is continuing to increase as organizations look to modernize more advanced workloads and deliver resources to remote and edge locations. Gartner says enterprise IT spending on public cloud is poised to overtake traditional IT spending. The research firm estimates that 51% of spending across application software, infrastructure software, business process services, and system infrastructure will shift from traditional platforms to public cloud by 2025, compared to 41% in 2022.
Deeper integration between cloud services is now prevalent, enabling a fabric or mesh of interconnected resources and data. As resource silos come down, data is free to flow between sources to centers of analysis and business intelligence, giving new life to the promise of edge environments for more robust and timely business insights and addressing the shortcomings of past implementations. “Today there’s greater integration and synergy between cloud services, so the opportunity for a data fabric or mesh is as close to reality as we’ve ever had. We have elevated the interconnectivity of disparate systems,” notes Edgar Haren, offering manager for Kyndryl Distributed Cloud.
Today there’s greater integration and synergy between cloud services, so the opportunity for a data fabric or mesh is as close to reality as we’ve ever had.
At the same time, public cloud providers are building bridges that enable organizations to connect diverse cloud environments to other deployment types, including other public clouds, on-premises, or the edge. Here is a snapshot of how the different cloud models line up:
Hybrid cloud is where workloads are running in a combination of public cloud and private cloud environments. You get the benefits of a public cloud along with the greater control and security of keeping assets on-premises. With hybrid cloud, although organizations get public cloud benefits, they may be limited to a single public cloud provider’s services.
Multicloud empowers organizations to tap best-of-breed technologies from different cloud vendors and adhere to geographical and location-based requirements without vendor lock-in. However, this highly mixed IT landscape can be extremely complex and difficult to manage.
Distributed cloud delivers the benefits of both models with less complexity. It leverages cloud-native tools and processes; provides consistent security and governance policies; and ensures deployment flexibility to support multiple public clouds, private clouds, and remote and edge uses cases. At the same time, single-pane-of-glass management enables workloads to be monitored and administered across all environments, greatly reducing IT architecture complexity.
