What Is The Current State Of Multi-Cloud?
The Future of Computing is in the Cloud
In April 2019, Teradici surveyed hundreds of IT Professionals In Virtualisation Roles across the globe to better understand the landscape of hybrid and multicloud desktop deployments, including the reasons for choosing them, how workloads are managed, and challenges associated with executing a multicloud strategy.
Respondents overwhelmingly believed in the importance of a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, regardless of whether they had actually implemented one themselves.
What is a multicloud deployment strategy?
The use of the term multicloud is still new to many organizations and so for the purposes of this report, Teradici has defined multicloud environments as those utilizing the services of at least two cloud providers.
- Public cloud providers include AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, and are universally accessible to consumers.
- Hybrid cloud scenarios refer to a combination of on-premises plus a public cloud with orchestration between the two. For those who are reluctant to move all workloads to the public cloud or for organization with stringent security/IP mandates, a hybrid environment provides the best of both worlds; the peace of mind of on-premises data centers plus the ability to optimize availability, scale when needed, and save costs in the cloud.
Top reasons when considering a hybrid or multicloud deployment
Multicloud environments, in the context of desktop deployments, are particularly advantageous for providing organisations, or groups/teams within an organisation, the ability to choose where their desktops are hosted leveraging the most suitable services. This can save time, effort, and cost. It also allows the ability to manage concurrent users; such as the option to serve a single virtual machine to alternating shift workers, for example.
According to the results, nearly half of the respondents (46%) said they currently operate in a single cloud or none at all. The remaining respondents (54%) operate in a multicloud environment, most commonly with two clouds. Of the 54 percent using a multicloud strategy, 9 percent of respondents are currently using a mix of 5 or more cloud services where they have moved workloads or applications across a varied mix of public cloud or on-premises environments.
Unsurprisingly the number of clouds increases with the company size.
Costs Savings
Those companies who are taking full advantage of the cloud’s benefits, and have implemented a hybrid or multicloud strategy were largely driven by two main overarching themes: cost and performance. Following cost savings (33%), the results showed nearly a quarter (24%) of respondents said that avoiding vendor lock-in was a major reason for considering their hybrid or multicloud strategy. Having the flexibility to move workloads from one cloud provider to another, enables companies to realize price elasticity by not relying on a single public cloud provider for fees and terms.
Avoid Vendor Lock-in
Exploring the options further, avoiding vendor lock-in is likely due to restrictions on price flexibility, and having to rely on a single public cloud provider for fees and terms. As for improving latency, being tied to a single public cloud, one is limited to the datacenter availability and locations of that public cloud provider. If multiple cloud providers are utilized, the number of available virtual machines and proximity to locations can improve.
Uptime Benefits
In addition, 27 percent of respondents felt uptime benefits, were a big reason to move to a hybrid or multicloud strategy. It is also a big focus for the top cloud providers to ensure that there is limited downtown as companies need to have ongoing access to their systems at all times without interruption.
A strategic choice for disaster recovery
Over half of respondents who have implemented a multicloud or hybrid cloud solution (54%) view it as very or extremely important, and this number increases to 61% when asked about the importance as it related to disaster recovery, suggesting that disaster recovery is a key consideration for many of those who have implemented a multicloud or hybrid cloud strategy.
In the event of disaster recovery, whether it be a trial run or an actual catastrophic event, workloads can be moved from cloud to cloud. On the flipside, enterprises can move workloads in a shorter, more frequent timeframe for cost reasons, load balancing, or for organization restructures.
Top reasons for moving workloads between clouds
A multicloud strategy has its benefits. If a secondary, or even tertiary cloud is in active use, i.e. not dormant for backup purposes, workloads can be shifted for many practical business reasons, including cost, disaster recovery, location of the data center, and availability of virtual machines/GPUs. Being tied to one or a small number of cloud providers lessens the complexity, but from a cost and resource utilization standpoint, a multicloud deployment can evolve and adapt with greater ease.
Factors to consider when choosing a virtualization solution
Ease of management, by far, was the most important factor in choosing a virtualization solution, as indicated by the responses, and this was consistent regardless of company size. A management plane or console that simplifies provisioning, brokering, updating, and power management can make managing virtual desktops less time-consuming and costly than traditional desktops.
Factors that influence respondents’ choice of public cloud vendor versus factors that influence reasons for moving workloads can be seen below
How a multicloud strategy combined with Cloud Access Software can help
With Cloud Access Software and a multicloud strategy, enterprises can
Teradici’s wide platform flexibility
Companies are leveraging Teradici’s unique technology to accelerate their enterprise cloud transition without compromising security, ease of management or user experience. Teradici’s true multicloud support enables any combination of public cloud, hybrid cloud and on-premises environments. Additional support includes Windows or Linux virtual desktops and GPU or non-GPU based infrastructure, while, in all cases, delivering the highperformance user experience that millions of enterprises using PCoIP (remote display protocol) technology enjoy today.
Respondents cited the most important factor in choosing a virtualization solution as ease of management. To aid in this, with every Cloud Access Software subscription, a management plane called Cloud Access Manager is included. It’s a brokering and provisioning service that works by enabling virtual machine entitlements, optimizing consumption costs, and monitoring of system health all from a single interface. With the introduction of multicloud entitlements, companies can now create and manage these virtual environments on AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or via their on-premise infrastructure, benefiting from the flexibility and agility that a multicloud strategy enables. workloads when needed, likely to balance loads, onboard new employees, or to set up new data centers.
For more details, download the free 15-page report to understand the key differences and benefits to the many cloud deployment models and the factors that are driving tomorrow’s decisions.