In today’s world, a single-environment approach to IT is no longer supporting the needs of modern businesses. According to my company’s fifth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI), organizations today, and moving forward, are apt to use more than one infrastructure – a trend that only intensified during the pandemic due to supply chain issues. This unique combination of circumstances prompted companies to quickly expand their IT infrastructure by deploying a mix of cloud environments. 

However, as companies and IT teams prioritized storage without careful consideration for management, they inadvertently created an “accidental multi-cloud,” which consequently spawned data security, protection recovery, data sovereignty, and compliance issues. Now, to remedy these complications, companies need an intentional solution. 

Over the past few years, there has been an explosion of applications. In fact, IDC forecasts that around 500 million new apps will be deployed by 2023, an amount equivalent to the past 40 years of computing combined. To tackle the onslaught of this unprecedented amount of innovation and associated data, IT teams turned to a mixture of IT infrastructures to fit their needs – private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, an on-premises data center along with a hosted data center, and others. This need for infrastructure diversity is now the norm for most enterprises and companies; however, this solution brings about new management challenges. Public clouds are especially appealing for innovation and rapid iteration but may not always be the ideal destination for a workload.

While most enterprises were able to remedy their initial problem – faster innovation, and limited capacity in their existing, on-premise infrastructure – with multiple IT infrastructures, the hybrid, multi-cloud created presents its own unique set of issues. One glaring roadblock is the lack of visibility and appropriate access to one’s data. In fact, according to the ECI report, only 40% of organizations report having complete visibility into where their data resides, meaning 60% are still falling short. Without access to data when and where you need it, teams are unable to operate in a proficient manner, since they are spending the bulk of their time confirming where the data is, and then moving it where it’s needed – we are still limited by speed of light. 

Additionally, the ECI report also reveals that data security and related backup, compliance, governance, and sovereignty functions are a few of the greatest IT management challenges companies are facing. Within organizations’ current IT infrastructures, data security, privacy, and compliance together are identified most often (88%) as a challenge. Though most enterprises were able to grasp the grand volumes of data brought by the creation of new applications, teams now realize they need to optimize not only where they host applications but also where they store their data to avoid these common challenges. 

While multi-cloud is a must-have and industry standard for enterprises, the emergence of this “accidental multi-cloud” and the need to optimize where applications are hosted and data is stored are causing IT decision-makers to realize they need a single platform to manage applications and data across clouds. This single, unified platform will allow IT teams to connect their infrastructures and manage their data simply and effectively. By employing such a platform, IT teams can not only access but also manage all their data without the headache of switching between infrastructures.

In addition, with the added security provided by the platform, enterprises can circumvent the problems that accompany the accidental multi-cloud. A single, unified platform also enables enterprises to truly run applications from anywhere and use the set of native services available – ultimately simplifying hybrid, multi-cloud deployments of workloads. Data growth and associated application innovation are unlikely to slow down anytime soon, and by adopting the right platform and model for distributing data and workloads across multiple infrastructures, enterprises can truly embrace hybrid multi-cloud and reap the benefits.