The supercloud can be viewed as an evolution of multi-cloud allowing organizations to be proactive and play the long game to ensure their business is set up to stay competitive down the road.
Most enterprises are already wading in the multi-cloud pool. This should come as little surprise since these environments provide organizations with all sorts of business benefits. For example, multi-cloud affords enterprises the opportunity to leverage the best-of-breed services that give them a competitive advantage in their respective markets. If one cloud excels with End User Compute, but another cloud has the best machine learning capabilities, a customer can employ the features in the first cloud while leveraging the ML tools in the second cloud.
At face value, multi-cloud shouldn’t be viewed from a cost-savings lens. A rigid workload placement strategy should be included as part of the planning to ensure cost optimization is present prior to workloads making it to production. Piecing through the integration of services through optimized network connectivity, for instance, will ensure high performance and capacity are present as the business scales.
However, multi-cloud deployments are also rife with hurdles. Many IT teams struggle to keep their heads above water, running operations for a single cloud deployment. When their organization dives into multi-cloud, they often feel like they’re drowning.
There’s inherent complexity in multi-cloud environments. Getting high availability and disaster recovery right for a single cloud has its challenges. Workloads are distributed across many regions, and each cloud works differently in how you obtain the desired availability required by your business. Taking this complexity and throwing multi-cloud into the mix causes these challenges to snowball quickly.
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Supercloud streamlines multi-cloud deployments
This is where the supercloud provides a life preserver. The term “supercloud” may sound a bit hyperbolic, and it’s easy to imagine seasoned IT veterans dismissing it altogether as just more marketing hype. But the technology – and its business value – are very real. In fact, Deloitte recently featured the supercloud in a report outlining key tech trends to watch for in 2023.
The supercloud employs a new pattern that sits above multi-cloud. In terms of business value, you can think of it as the fabric that enables cross-cloud services for the enterprise. It can be costly and time-consuming to build out security, governance, network, and operations strategies for each cloud provider. Being able to consolidate these verticals can reduce touchpoints, simplify operations, and significantly enhance the enterprise’s ability to adapt to the market.
At a high level, the supercloud’s value is straightforward: Supercloud enables organizations to manage and grow multi-cloud environments reliably and in a manner that is consistent with their operations and risk profile. As a result, organizations get more ROI from their multi-cloud deployments, and these environments become assets that support key business goals rather than obstacles that hinder them.
See also: On-Prem + Multi-Cloud Visibility: Why is the Cloud so Cloudy?
Separating the “super” from the sub-par
As vendors try to align their solutions to this new trend, it’s important to drill down more and define some essential capabilities. For the supercloud to deliver on its promise and achieve all these benefits, it must check three boxes. First, it must run as a service across cloud providers. This makes it adoptable and adaptable to enterprises more broadly. Second, the supercloud should leverage the cloud-native constructs of each public cloud provider so that the innovation of the public cloud offerings can become realized and adapted. Lastly, it must provide a consistent experience for practitioners by abstracting the underlying components of each cloud platform, thus removing touchpoints and complexity.
At the end of the day, enterprises want an easy way to solve the long-lingering obstacles and bottlenecks in their clouds. That means breaking down silos, minimizing Shadow IT, implementing enhanced end-to-end security, and achieving a new level of speed and agility in scaling their network to meet any business need. The supercloud provides an elegant solution to these problems.
Of course, there are questions that need to be answered as the supercloud gains steam in the enterprise. For example, how will cloud networking vendors evolve to support better support this concept? Moreover, how will the major public cloud providers respond? But solutions to these questions will become clearer as the supercloud breaks into the mainstream over the coming few years.
A proactive approach to multi-cloud
The supercloud can be viewed as an evolution of multi-cloud. As organizations started their multi-cloud journeys, their approach was often reactive. The supercloud provides enterprises the opportunity to be proactive and play the long game to ensure their business is set up to stay competitive down the road. This creates a unique opportunity to simplify design and operations by employing a single fabric, or abstraction, that connects users to the clouds, across clouds, and to on-premises sites.
It’s easy to feel skeptical when a new concept with a catchy name first arrives. But unlike many buzzy trends, this isn’t simply a vision of what could be in the future. The technology underpinning the supercloud exists today. And a growing number of enterprises have begun to take advantage of it. As the space continues to mature, organizations will shift their gaze to the value proposition of multi-cloud rather than the overhead and execution.
More organizations will realize that there’s a way to benefit from multi-cloud without having to grapple with it.
