During the pandemic, we saw cloud adoption surge on the back of accelerated digitalisation as the world moved online. According to some estimates, digital transformation was advanced by up to seven years during this time.
This growth shows no sign of slowing down. With Gartner predicting that: “over 85% of organisations will embrace the cloud-first principle by 2025, with over 95% of new workloads being deployed on cloud-native platforms (up from 30% in 2021)”.
Recognising that there is no business strategy without a cloud strategy, as enterprise infrastructures evolve and shift, IT leaders are working to create cohesive cloud strategies that are both expansive and forward looking in order to reap the full business value of the cloud – not only to drive technological innovation, but also to serve as the foundation for business innovation.
Behind these benefits, a vast ecosystem of potential partners have emerged to meet the demand. The hyperscale providers in particular - such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud – all have the scale necessary for businesses looking into taking advantage of all the cloud has to offer, together with cutting edge capabilities. It’s not a surprise that Gartner predicted that “50% of enterprise workloads will be on a hyperscale platform by 2025”.
With so many options available and unique requirements around critical workloads for every company, many businesses are increasingly turning to a multicloud strategy which enables them to select the best provider for each specific workload – offering at the same time greater flexibility, security, global coverage, and much more.
While the benefits of a multicloud approach are clear, the challenges should not be underestimated. Especially when it comes to the question on how to best connect and manage multiple cloud environments.
As businesses move more of their critical workloads to the cloud, this has led to a growing dependency on ‘connectivity to, within, and between clouds.’
Meanwhile, the rise of multicloud, distributed applications, cloud-to-cloud integration are increasing the overall complexity of cloud connectivity. And that’s without adding the additional complication of regional cloud ecosystems driven by geopolitical regulatory fragmentation, protectionism and industry compliance.
With interest in cloud networking on the rise, enterprises are seeking new ways to enable consistent networking policy, security, governance and visibility across multiple cloud environments.
This is evidenced by recent predictions from Gartner who stated that: “By 2025, 35% of companies that use multiple public cloud providers will use a single network stack, an increase of over 10 times from 2021.” – giving rise to the question: how can my business interconnect smarter?
As a result, a market has emerged to address this shift from purely ‘to’ the cloud, to include networking ‘in' the cloud – enabling organisations to deploy in one, or multiple cloud environments including public cloud(s), private cloud(s) and distributed cloud / edge locations.
Designed to simplify cloud connectivity, SDCI is quickly gained popularity by offering companies to quickly interconnect multiple clouds and other service providers using preprovisioned connections. According to Gartner, “By 2025, enterprises using SDCI to connect to cloud services will rise from less than 10% in 2021 to 30%.”
SDCI not only connects to many IaaS, SaaS, ISPs, and carriers, importantly the private connectivity it offers is virtualised and automated. This means you can easily connect to the resources you need, when you need them, and for how long you need them. With a wider service choice, better performance management, and more interservice integration options, SDCI makes it easier than ever to connect to the resources you need.
Additionally, as multicloud setups become more common, the need for consolidated management of administrative and technical requirements becomes more critical. SDCI provides tools to help with this, as well as being complementary to SD-WAN architectures. This makes it an important consideration for companies using the cloud. SD-WAN is becoming the new normal for many companies, and SDCI provides the added advantage of being able to work with this technology. This makes it a valuable tool for any company using the cloud.
As the only SDCI provider delivering a secure, end-to-end managed service, InterCloud is here to help your business achieve the best business outcome by simplifying and accelerating your network operations.
By leveraging a multi-underlay network, we offer managed connectivity services backed with a comprehensive SLA - enabling better performance, visibility, security and compliance in your cloud transformation journey.
Find out how we can help your business interconnect smarter to secure your cloud journey: here.
InterCloud’s end-to-end global connectivity platform eliminates the complexity in deploying the cloud, giving businesses full control over the security, sovereignty and performance of their critical data traffic with complete peace of mind.
Working with organisations to help them transform global connectivity, reduce network complexity and accelerate growth and innovation, InterCloud is a trusted advisor to some of the world's leading brands when it comes to leveraging the cloud for future success
With offices across Europe, the company's platform is underpinned by its team of cloud experts who guide customers to implement effective strategies to leverage the power of the cloud across their organisation – making global connectivity a driver for business performance .