The business of hybrid and multicloud cloud computing

October 30, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

There are two basic values that come from hybrid and multicloud infrastructure: Ops savings, and business agility. A single cloud provider can deliver both values, but a hybrid or multicloud is able to provide even more of both. Indeed, the more services, such as storage, compute, database, etc., that are available to developers and users, the more value that can be delivered because both cost efficiency and agility are increased.

Ops cost saving was the primary benefit of cloud computing when the concept became popular over 10 years ago. Indeed, the “capital expenditure or CapEx” vs. “operational expenditure or OpEx” lead the popular way to define the value of cloud.

While indeed is was possible to save an average of 10-30 percent on operational costs with cloud computing in many instances that did not justify the migration to public cloud. However, the true value was understood once enterprises were leveraging cloud computing and enjoying the agility that was provided to a business, as well as the ability to compress time-to-market. Indeed, today the value of agility to cloud computing, including hybrid and multicloud bring to enterprises is considered the core reason to leverage cloud over any operational cost benefits.¹

The availability of heterogeneous cloud computing services has the potential to offer several advantages including:

• The ability to pick services that have the best uptime and reliability ratings among two or more cloud brands. 
• The ability to pick services that have the best price and terms. Cloud service costs are complex and leveraging a cost governance platform provide you with the ability to find the best price for the specific purpose, evaluating two or more alternatives. 
• The ability to pick to leverage “cross cloud” services, such as compute from one cloud provider and database from another. This allow for mixing and matching of “best of breed” services.

While many are automatically moving to hybrid and multicloud computing, the business benefits should be known to you before making the move, and that means understanding everything mentioned in this blog.

So, how do you measure and justify an increased in business agility? It’s really a matter of understanding what your “as is” state is, and then the potential of leveraging more agile IT resources, such as cloud resources. What problems will be solved, and more importantly, will the business be more innovative and agile. There is higher potential for value there than most understand.

¹https://www.cloudtp.com/doppler/cloud-economics-getting-bigger-picture/