Andrew Senior, Cloud Architect at Nutanix, explains how the hybrid multi-cloud will give customers flexibility.
Shifting to a work from home (WFH) environment is proven to be possible and successful for knowledge workers, online service jobs and students, but it’s been disruptive to traditional field-based professions. There is no doubt that WFH has fundamentally shifted the flow of data via online messaging apps, which are all hosted in the cloud, and all of this traffic is now competing with your other cloud-based applications and services.
The move to modernised consumption of applications via Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) and/or Desktop-as-as-Service (DaaS) environments from on-premises isn’t new. It’s been slowly ticking over for the last 12 to 15 years as a result of a ‘virtualise everything’ approach, followed by IT and business. The remote working tools at our disposal today are enabling a level of productivity never seen before, and business has seen that there isn’t always a requirement to run locally what can be run in the cloud – although – on-premises is still exceptionally important and the case for hybridity in infrastructure is still very relevant.
There has been a massive jump in the flow of traffic, and businesses are reporting that VPN usage is up 65%, a peak that was predicted but that arrived 12 to 18 months earlier than forecasted. It has been well publicised that there has been over a billion instances of people shifting to Dropbox and iCloud storage.
Many people were forced to migrate during the pandemic which has compromised their security as moving everyone to the edge while working on the same applications can create challenges, whereas, a DaaS environment enables business to stream the apps they need to the edge – when they need them, whilst maintaining centralised control.
The hybrid multi-cloud gives you the flexibility needed to spread your risk and quickly and easily jump between the cloud environment being used for a specific workflow or set of applications.
A DaaS solution has become popular, as it allows you to stream an application without needing your end device (laptop/tablet) to be reminiscent of a supercomputer.
When a company deploys a hybrid solution, it can get a better view on how to orchestrate workloads as well as ensure governance is applied. Data sovereignty requires your data to be closer to home which does, in part, help prevent latency, so having an app service a customer, wherever they are, while being situated centrally is a key driver.
The hybrid model is the way of the future and when applied effectively your environment will look the same and behave the same, whether it is on-prem or in the cloud. You will be able to monitor it, manage it and view it centrally – giving IT power and control over the environment. IT as a utility is coming, devices such as laptops need to become more resilient and their costs must come down. Making strides to view and think of your software design as an architecture on its own is going to be vital into the future.