For nearly a decade now, cloud adoption has underpinned digital transformation initiatives for almost all businesses. However, organisations have so far taken a “Cloud First” approach which is largely focused on modernising legacy infrastructure and often results in maximising cloud footprint. While the benefits of this approach were apparent at first, this hasn’t always paid in terms of achieving the overarching and long-term cloud goals. Here are the two key reasons to this:
- Cloud first approach was speed centric and, in this rush, to adopt cloud organisations ended up with unoptimised cloud environments which caused costs to spiral. This also resulted in unmodified workloads that failed to unlock critical cloud benefits.
- As with most technologies, cloud has evolved at a rapid pace resulting in complicated multi cloud environments. With the lack of specialised skills and strategy, organisations have ended up with complex and fragmented implementations across mix of cloud platforms which are no longer as agile, efficient and secure as they had expected.
Therefore, it becomes crucial for organisations to transition to a cloud-smart approach with optimum usage rather than just a cloud-first model. A cloud-smart model helps organisations determine the right infrastructure mix between on-prem infrastructure, private & public cloud and Edge to support varied workloads and complex regulatory requirements.