Start the year with a fresh look at cloud

Most businesses today make use of cloud computing, but many have yet to wake up to the full potential of hybrid and multi-cloud as a deliberate strategy.

Becoming cloud-agnostic and being able to move workloads between public and private cloud environments can introduce agility, allow organisations to tailor the right mix of public cloud offerings to their specific needs, or to pick the products with which their teams are most familiar.

It's also a way to avoid being locked-in with one cloud provider, subject to their whim in terms of pricing and product withdrawals, and it can add more resilience.

But there are also risks. It can be difficult to keep track of cost across multiple instances and workloads with a variety of vendors, and the same can be said of data as it flows through several different clouds, often across multiple regions. There's also a potential loss of buying power: even larger enterprises may be treated as a smaller customer as the slice of their business going to any one provider decreases. And the ever-present skills shortages can favour the single-vendor model.

Like most things tech, cloud is complex and full of tradeoffs, but there is no doubt that multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are the way the industry is moving.

You may have evolved into using the hybrid model almost by accident or because of the need to support legacy infrastructure or applications. You may be looking at multiple cloud vendors as part of a best-in-breed strategy for compliance reasons - or you might be moving decisively towards a single vendor or none at all.

Whatever your strategy, it pays to remain cognizant of your options as the world changes as the result of new regional regulations and fresh innovations and unpredictable events.

We do hope you'll join us online in February for Deskflix Hybrid & Multicloud.

Our agenda includes discussions on: