Gartner refers to the cloud as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using Internet technologies.
Donna Scott, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner wrote: “A cloud strategy clearly defines the business outcomes you seek, and how you are going to get there. Having a cloud strategy will enable you to apply its tenets quickly with fewer delays, thus speeding the arrival of your ultimate business outcomes.”
But more a decade since its inception, Gartner estimates that less than one-third of enterprises have a documented cloud strategy.
Inertia against cloud adoption may be heading out the door as more organisations take advantage of the technical benefits of cloud, including scale, elasticity and flexibility. But even as the concerns against cloud go by the wayside, new concerns rise above the ding to create humps that may slow any momentum created by cloud acceptance – namely, going cloud-native.
“‘Cloud computing’ is evolving to become just ‘computing,’ and cloud-native design in new investments is becoming pervasive across organizations, use cases and deployment models,” added Yefim Natis, distinguished research vice president, Gartner.
Janakiram MSV, architect at Janakiram & Associates, explained that cloud-native technologies are used to develop applications built with services packaged in containers, deployed as microservices and managed on elastic infrastructure through agile DevOps processes and continuous delivery workflows.
Amr Awadallah, chief technology officer, Cloudera
Attending the Cloudera Analyst Summit in New York City this September 2019, FutureCIO caught up with Amr Awadallah (photo above), chief technology officer at Cloudera, to get his perspective on how large enterprises are accelerating their immersion into cloud and cloud-native applications.
Cloudera, one of the largest proponents of Hadoop, launched Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), describing it as the industry’s first enterprise data cloud. Having built its business predominantly on on-prem big data solutions, the release of cloud-native CDP recognising growing demand for better performance from applications and services running in the cloud.
Enterprises want to go into the cloud by capitalising on the learnings of early movers to the cloud. That they don’t want to start from scratch is easy enough to understand.
“We want to be able to leverage data in the cloud the same way we have been doing it on-premise. We want to be able to move between clouds, but we don't know which cloud is the right cloud for us for the long-term. Today it could be Google or Amazon or Microsoft Azure. We want to have that flexibility of being able to work with any cloud. We want to have the flexibility to move between cloud even the ability to go back to on-prem,” Awadallah added.
Part of the challenge for enterprises today is the proliferation of point solutions that don’t necessarily integrate well – perpetrating siloed operations and systems. “Enterprises want to do away with the multiple copies of the same data currently in place. They want one copy of the data but be able to consume it in different ways depending on what they're trying to do,” he elaborated.
He also cited the growing incidence of breaches as a result of the proliferation of Shadow IT in many organisations. “Shadow IT comes as a result of businesses being empowered to roll out IT solutions in support of business – without oversight from IT. The lack of security and governance exposes organisations to potential compliance issues including around data privacy and data protection,” he explained.
The need for open data formats is also growing in importance. He cited the use of proprietary data formats by social vendors makes it difficult for enterprises to leverage the data because “you are locked into that proprietary format,” he concluded.
Click on the video above and watch Cloudera’s Awadallah describe the challenges that enterprises must overcome as they embrace cloud-native strategies to take advantage of the full potential of cloud and open data.
