CIOs across multiple organizations have found themselves struggling with their priorities in recent times. On one hand, they are keen to implement transformative digital projects that can propel their companies towards growth. On the other hand, there has been a growing need to bolster organizational resilience, especially in this post-pandemic environment, while cutting down on costs.
Compounding matters is the situation that during the height of the pandemic, IT leaders were swiftly building on-premises and cloud technologies with which to build digital services that created socially distant bridges to their stakeholders. They seemed at first to be the optimal solution at that time to address the remote setup situation of many teams and their members, but they have been found to be inefficient and clunky, with data latency, performance taxes, and unwieldy security profiles.
In spite of these challenges, CIOs can optimize the placement of their workloads across a multi-cloud IT estate.
Multi-cloud by design: key to IT optimization
For one, the multi-cloud-by-design approach brings management consistency to storing, protecting, and securing data in multi-cloud environments. Delivered as-a-service and via a pay-per-use model, this cloud-like strategy helps IT leaders provide a cloud experience while hardening the business and reining in costs. In particular, it helps build business value in four ways:
Cost optimization: IT teams can operate like the public cloud while retaining your assets on-premises by the means of employing a pay-per-use consumption model. This allows IT leaders to align infrastructure costs with use, thus reducing overprovisioning by up to 42% and enjoying up to 39% savings in costs over a three-year operating period.
Productivity: IT can reduce the reliance on reskilling by placing workloads in their optimal location, which will help mitigate risk and control costs.
Digital resiliency: Subscription-based offerings help reduce risks associated with unplanned downtime and costs with as much as 46% faster time to recovery.
Business acceleration: Optimizing workload placement with pay-per-use and subscription models helps shorten cycles for procuring and deploying new compute, storage, or data protection capacity up to 60% faster. This helps business boost time to value compared with existing on-premises environments that do not leverage flexible consumption models.
Key takeaway
CIOs have the unenviable task of balancing the goal of implementing transformative digital solutions while maintaining predictability and affordability for the business that has its resources severely constrained as a result of the pandemic, inflation, and other problems it may be facing. That does not even take into account the potential performance and latency concerns, as well as security and data locality issues that might be encountered along the way in the course of testing new technologies.
Ultimately, organizations that can react nimbly to changing business requirements with resiliency are more likely to prosper by adopting new ways of operating IT and having the right partners to help do the job right.