Covid-19 changed the dynamics of how businesses operate. Remote work is where it’s at, and it’s here to stay. We will never go back to working entirely from a shared office. Instead, most companies will have a mixed model — a hybrid model. The cloud has been key in enabling that.
That’s why we saw accelerated cloud adoption amid the pandemic. Gartner projects that the cloud will account for 14.2% of global enterprise IT spending in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020.
Like the new work model, the cloud model is hybrid, too. Organizations employ public cloud resources and have private cloud data centers inside their companies. But the connection between private and public clouds is tenuous. Public and private clouds have different approaches to instrumentation, orchestration and provisioning. This leads to sub-optimal cost of ownership, security and compliance gaps, and latency and governance issues.
The best way forward is the distributed cloud. According to Gartner, “Distributed cloud creates strategically placed substations of cloud compute, storage and networking that can act as shared cloud pseudoavailability zones.” It adds that “By 2024, most cloud service platforms will provide at least some distributed cloud services that execute at the point of need.”
According to a Technologent blog post, "The distributed cloud retains technical, financial and operational benefits of the cloud while enabling greater performance, redundancy, security and regulatory compliance." But to make this work, enterprises need a unified view to gain greater control over their costs, cybersecurity and governance. They also need to be able to leverage technological advancements to enable peak performance for applications.
How to do all of that is still evolving. But there are some steps that your company can take today to realize the potential of distributed cloud and improve business outcomes...
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