By Ben Schein, Domo’s VP of Data Curiosity 

As businesses across industries are continually innovating, the adoption of a multi-cloud strategy is becoming more popular. Cloud adoption has been accelerated by the pandemic and the subsequent adoption of flexible working conditions by businesses worldwide. Therefore, business leaders are seeing first hand the importance of data, cloud infrastructure and business intelligence.

Cloud computing is a term that covers a wide range of technologies and services. It generally refers to the ability to access data and applications over the Internet, often from a remote location. It enables on-demand availability of resources, data, and computing power that can be allocated over numerous locations. This can be done either through cloud-based services, such as ATP, or through on-premises cloud solutions, such as private cloud. In this way, all teams can access and integrate cloud data and create a network that meets the specific needs of each team.

The role which cloud computing plays in business and how spending has increased 

As forecasted by IDC, spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments will surpass that of other scenarios for the first time, later this year. In its latest Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker, IDC said such spending rose 17.2% in the first quarter from a year ago, to $18.3 billion.

The hybrid cloud market was worth $52 billion in 2020 and grew to $85.3 billion in 2021, highlighting the growing adoption of hybrid technologies and services (Statista, 2021 & PRNewsWire, 2022). Organisations are continually looking for new ways to address growing business demands and challenges, especially with the pandemic making a profound and transformative impact. 

IDC’s cloud services tracker showed the total revenue for segments such as infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service and more increased by 29% in 2021, to $408.6 billion.

This year, according to a Flexera report, a survey reported 59% of organisations are optimising their existing use of cloud and 57% are migrating more workloads to cloud infrastructure, which are the top cloud strategies for 2022. In order to stay competitive as we move more into the digital world, organisations rely on hybrid cloud infrastructures and therefore more investments into cloud technology is necessary. 

How a multi-cloud strategy can benefit your business, whilst alleviating stress

A multi-cloud strategy is when an organisation uses more than one cloud provider. Using this infrastructure across the business brings about a lot of advantages, including cost savings, less complex processes, and an increase in consistency and flexibility. There are seven main benefits: cost, global scale, performance, security, speed, productivity, and reliability. Each type of cloud has its own advantages and disadvantages, so it’s important to choose the right cloud solution for your needs. 

Each cloud platform specialises in a unique task that can pull in and integrate data from a variety of sources, so strategic decisions can be executed efficiently and with precision. As remote working is increasingly becoming the preferred work model, this infrastructure best addresses employee’s needs to ensure operation is productive and organised. Being able to easily create, share and analyse information emphasises the collaborative advantage of cloud computing. Centralising all cloud data enables readily available data for employees, customers and partners and more efficient business decisions and reports. With working models moving into hybrid or fully remote, cloud computing is key to streamlining processes across the whole business, whilst reducing stress for your workforce. 

Furthermore, enhanced data governance is a key benefit, as data remains secure yet accessible. Team members are able to create dynamic data attributes that ensure users have access to data based on differing levels of permission. 

To summarise, having multi-cloud capabilities can benefit your business in three simple ways: 

• Integrating more data and at a higher magnitude
• Enhanced data governance 
• Empowering your employees and teams with data to encourage agile decision making while creating a data-driven enterprise

How these trends will continue in years to come 

It is evident that technologies such as cloud computing, hybrid and multi cloud strategies are critical to business sustainability, resource efficiency, and staying competitive. The ongoing pandemic and persistent reliability on digital services are making the cloud a central component in businesses, specifically business strategies, ways of working and sustainability. A Microsoft report showed that most enterprises are choosing these technologies with strategic objectives and continually deploying cloud solutions for not only across the business, but for other specific purposes too. It was also reported that flexibility and freedom of choice were identified as clear needs from businesses that are adopting the right mix of cloud and tools. To emphasise cloud computing growth, Gartner forecasts that 85% of organisations will be ‘cloud first’ and at least 95% of digital duties will be situated on cloud platforms by the end of 2025. 

Finally, almost nine out of ten respondents say they will increase their spending on hybrid or multi cloud over the next three years. According to IDC, businesses will spend a combined $90.2 billion on cloud infrastructure services. Collaboration software and cloud infrastructures are becoming more powerful and integral to business processes not only because of efficiency and productivity levels, but importantly because of the on-demand services that allows team members to act fact and make decisions when data is breached.