By Anant Adya, EVP and GTM Head for Cobalt at Infosys

The benefits of having diverse deployment options are undermined when workloads are placed without consulting the I&O (infrastructure and operations) team at the planning stage. Unfortunately, this is so common that a leading research and consulting firm estimates that 85 percent of the workloads placed as of 2022 will not be optimal in 2027.

It is imperative that organizations develop an optimal workload placement approach to ensure the right outcomes - cost reduction, agility, stability and other business targets - and continuously monitor their decisions by tracking actual performance again technical capabilities.

We believe the answer is to adopt a "cloud everywhere" strategy.

What happened to cloud-first?

While "cloud-first" says that cloud should be the primary option for all technology requirements, the fact is that a substantial portion of enterprise data is still stored on-premises, making hybrid infrastructure the de facto choice for most companies.

The "cloud everywhere" principle accommodates this reality with a broader approach, which, while hosting most IT operations and data on cloud, allows for some use of on-premises infrastructure.

Accordingly, cloud everywhere enables enterprises to combine the advantages of various deployment options - public and private cloud, edge, SaaS, and on-premises deployments - to improve IT infrastructure efficiency and leverage distributed data and compute for driving modernization and innovation. Specifically, it provides for a catalog of cloud services available from public cloud, colocation, enterprise data center and edge environments and a model for deploying and consuming the services in any of these facilities. Efficiency and innovation apart, cloud everywhere leads to a better experience for both IT developers and business users.

Let's detail these advantages further. By taking a cloud everywhere approach for optimizing workload placement, organizations can:

Enjoy flexibility of deployment: Cloud everywhere allows enterprises to select the best cloud environment for each workload, thereby optimizing resource allocation and avoiding vendor lock-in. They can easily migrate and build applications for different clouds, choosing from a selection of cloud vendors based on criteria such as speed, reliability, performance, geographic location and security.

Have unlimited scalability: Organizations can quickly scale up data storage and compute on-demand to optimize peak-load performance and ramp down equally quickly during lean periods. Without having to invest in physical infrastructure.

Improve cost efficiency: Not tied to any single cloud provider, enterprises can shop around to secure the best "price for performance" and only pay for what they use. A cloud everywhere approach also lowers IT expenditure by increasing adoption of public cloud, which mostly entails variable costs.

Achieve high availability and resilience: Workloads distributed across several cloud service providers withstand outages better, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. Also, by storing data in multiple cloud geos, enterprises create adequate data redundancy to ensure they do not lose data even if a particular cloud goes down. By eliminating the risk of single point of failure, cloud everywhere ensures that a breakdown in one cloud does not affect workloads running on other clouds. Even performance, in terms of latency, for example, can be improved by placing workloads in cloud data centers located close to the user.

Innovate better: Enterprises can choose from the latest cloud features and technologies, including AI, machine learning and predictive analytics offered by different providers to accelerate their own innovation programs. Developers can rapidly test and iterate new ideas, as well as build prototypes on cloud without investing in IT infrastructure. Cross-functional teams can share data, even across locations, to collaborate on innovation projects. It is also possible to provide new insights for innovation by integrating data from various sources and running it through cloud-based analytics solutions.

Ensure advanced security and regulatory compliance:  Cloud everywhere allows organizations to deploy and scale workloads while ensuring consistent security and compliance policy implementation across all workloads, cloud vendors and environments. 

A significant and distinct feature of cloud everywhere is full stack observability, that is, the ability to see right across the IT infrastructure, including applications, networks and cloud services, to gain a unified, holistic view of all cloud environments, whether they are on-premise, on different public clouds, in a hybrid cloud setup, or on the edge. Such visibility leads to insights and innovation. But because organizations can also view and analyze performance and monitoring data on a "single pane of glass," they can even troubleshoot and manage incidents, including bottlenecks and security threats, proactively and efficiently.

Many enterprises are already using public cloud platforms and infrastructure services. But without a considered approach to workload placement, they could end up with fragile and suboptimal deployments. Cloud everywhere offers a proven way to choose the right environment - on-premises, public cloud, private cloud or edge - for every workload to maximize outcomes, from flexibility and scalability to efficiency and innovation.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anant Adya is EVP and GTM Head for Cobalt at Infosys. He and his team are responsible for designing solutions to help customers in their Digital and Cloud journey. Cobalt for Infosys is a set of Solutions, Platforms and Services that help Enterprise Journey to Digital. They also leverage the Infosys Innovation team to partner with the startup ecosystem to co-create solutions for customers. He is very passionate about Industry Clouds, use cases around the 6 Technologies (Cloud, AI, Data, Edge, IoT & 5G) and most importantly working with Enterprises to focus on Business Outcomes.