Dive Brief:
- Most companies use multiple cloud platforms in a hybrid ecosystem that includes on-prem infrastructure, according to Deloitte tech trends report published Wednesday.
- The proliferation of platforms and “as a Service” features creates redundancies, inefficiencies and complexities, making cost and security governance difficult to manage, the report said.
- As a result, many companies struggle to achieve the full benefits of modernization and need tools to mitigate multicloud chaos, according to Deloitte.
Dive Insight:
Concerns about vendor lock-in have given way to multicloud chaos for companies in the aggressive pursuit of modernization.
Consolidation within a single cloud is untenable for most enterprises, with individual business units demanding access to best-in-breed solutions.
“Intelligent decisions in the micro have manifested as a hairball in the macro,” Mike Bechtel, chief futurist at Deloitte Consulting, said. “The winning strategy is starting to move towards moving ‘above’ the cloud by investing in and deploying metacloud or supercloud capabilities.”
Metacloud, supercloud or sky computing places a compatibility layer above various cloud platforms, providing observability, access and governance for storage, compute and application development and deployment, the report said.
“Any one of the big cloud providers is technically able but from a business perspective less than enthusiastic about being the lingua franca between them all,” Bechtel said in an interview with CIO Dive.
Third-party vendors have begun to fill the void, offering features and services that rationalize hybrid multicloud ecosystems.
“Observability is the watchword,” said Bechtel.
To reduce hybrid multicloud headaches, vendors like BigPanda and Dynatrace are creating governance tools that provide a unified view of IT ecosystems through a single control plane, Bechtel said.
At the same time, a renaissance in on-prem technology has renewed enthusiasm for the prematurely relegated mainframe.
“The rumors and the casual acceptance that mainframes are about to go extinct are just that — they’re rumors,” Bechtel said.
Integrating legacy tools with new applications can be difficult and recruiting tech talent with mainframe skills is a challenge for many companies, according to the report. But, as next-generation mainframe performance improves and capabilities expand to encompass DevOps and AIOps, the market for on-prem environments will continue to grow.
“What you've basically got is an emergent recognition that cloud, for its well documented benefits, really butters its bread on breadth,” said Bechtel. “But mainframes continue to be the best solution in town for very deep, very focused domain specific problems.”
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect Deloitte’s report came out Wednesday.
