The migration of vast amounts of data and data processing to the cloud — or more precisely, to multiple clouds — is arguably the biggest change in enterprise computing in the past decade. More organizations are moving to public clouds, and typically, to public–private hybrid data center architectures. At the same time, they are leveraging infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in the quest for ever-greater agility. Technology analyst Gartner projects that by 2025, a little more than half of all IT spending in addressable market segments will have shifted from traditional solutions to the public cloud, compared to 41% in 2022, and total revenue spend on public cloud is expected to exceed $900 billion by 2025.
The distinction between “the cloud” and “multiple clouds” is not trivial. Increasingly, enterprises are adopting multicloud platforms and service providers. One thing is clear: The idea of an enterprise data center as a single, secure physical space is headed the way of the dinosaur. Modern data centers are increasingly a heterogeneous mix of environments and technologies that combine physical servers, virtual machines, and containers in on-premises facilities, private clouds, and public cloud IaaS providers. And these disparate installations are not static — organizations are constantly shifting data and workloads among their various on-premises and cloud environments as traffic levels and processing demands dictate.
