Is Your Business Cloud Ready For 2022

2021 will be the year we reflect upon in a few months time, as a year that saw many businesses attempt to recover from 2020. 2022 is yet to be defined, as much focus still remains driven towards ensuring that businesses have built resilience into their operations, allowing for adaptability for what 2022 holds.

The ability to adapt to the new world of work and the additional challenges that now lie ahead will be the defining factor for those who will maintain business success – and those who won’t.

Although companies had previously set long term goals for their digital transformation, the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital solutions to ensure business continuity and sustainability. As a result, senior business leaders have realised their increasing dependency on technology as critical to the success of their companies and the role that hybrid cloud will play as they plan for the future.

We believe that hybrid cloud provides companies with a trusted and capable foundation to adapt to changing market needs.

In a hybrid cloud landscape, five key reasons amplify the case for adoption:

1. Hybrid cloud brings agility, business resilience and continuity to the forefront

Agility has always been a crucial outcome for most if not all companies. The ability to innovate and respond to changing market conditions is vital.

Yet the speed, scale, and intensity of the impact of Covid-19 has exposed certain deficiencies that may not have been considered. In our experience, it is often the case that the infrastructure and services requirements for transformation are understated when planning deployments of cloud solutions but should be one of the foundational elements.

2. Hybrid cloud brings security and compliance complexities

As distributed workloads have become the standard, and the security attack surface has expanded and has potentially become as dynamic as the intelligent infrastructure across the hybrid cloud environment. Therefore, the overall response to the new security challenges must be equally up to the task.

From conceptualisation and design of Information Technology (IT) interventions, integration of Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) solutions, and finally, full-stack operations within the enterprise, companies have to adopt the mantra of secure by design, covering the workforce, workloads and workplace enabling business continuity seamlessly.

In this respect, embedded security moves from being a cost centre to being the critical transformation enabler under shared organisational responsibility.

3. Hybrid cloud is a driver for cost efficiency

A more efficient total cost of IT operations is the biggest driver of hybrid cloud adoption, and it’s easy to see why. The shift to a distributed workforce model has meant people require access to both data and applications in new, different, and often complex ways – and organisations want to enable that with high-performance but in a cost-efficient manner.

For instance, for the wide area network, software-defined networking (SD-WAN) has emerged as a more cost-effective way of connecting to the cloud but it’s important to note that optimising traffic flows across multiple connectivity options requires proper architecture and ongoing analysis and management.

4. Hybrid cloud simplifies internal operations through automation

While it is complex to implement, hybrid cloud ultimately simplifies internal operations through automation and streamlines the management of IT resources. This increases overall efficiency by reducing the time spent by IT teams on managing supporting infrastructures.

To take advantage of hybrid cloud, understanding exactly what works in any given scenario, as well as how and where it can fulfil the needs of a particular business model is crucial. Mixing public and private cloud leverages the best of both worlds, each for different reasons and of course, different workload priorities.

Hybrid cloud offers business and IT leaders the chance to meet changing business demands head- on. While continuity and business resilience are fundamental, improving customer experiences and growing revenues still features highly on the list of business objectives.

5. You don’t have to go it alone

The role of partners also brings to light not only how much organisations rely on their skills and expertise, but how they drive greater efficiencies through intelligent platforms and automation.

With more and more enterprises shifting a majority of their IT infrastructure to third parties, they now fully deserve their place among people, process, technology, and partners.

“We believe that no two clouds are the same, and as such that no two implementations or approaches should be identical. Each cloud offering must be developed to serve a specific need and to answer a specific question.”

Kemigisha is the Head of Hybrid Cloud at Dimension Data East and West Africa