The journey to the cloud is well underway. Market efficiencies, economics and technology have advanced sufficiently, and it is inevitable that virtually all organizational functions and technology Infrastructure will lever public clouds in some capacity. In fact, a recent Gartner forecast expects that by 2020 more than $1 trillion in IT spending will either be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to the cloud. Gartner notes that, “this will make cloud computing one of the most disruptive forces of IT spending since the early days of the digital age.”
I don’t disagree, but there are consequences; and here’s one of the biggest: moving all your data and applications to a single public cloud provider represents a massive vendor lock-in. Even moving just a subset of your data and applications introduces significant financial and supplier risk. The obvious solution is to leverage multiple public cloud providers.
That leads to a different challenge: How do you overcome the inherent portability, locality, and availability constraints of moving data among clouds?
Reaping the Business Benefits of Multiple-Cloud Requires Cross-Cloud Replication
As organizations move to multiple public clouds, they in turn will need a way to synchronize data seamlessly across multiple providers — cross-cloud replication makes this possible. Cross-cloud replication enables organizations to move applications easily among different cloud sites and, as importantly, cloud providers. It’s the missing piece that makes the multi-cloud world we hear and read so much about a reality today. It ensures that no matter where you run your app, it will have local access to its data.
Why is this important? The promise of a multi-cloud future is one in which you’re able to move your application dynamically based on business requirements. If you can replicate your data across all of the public cloud services, then you can eliminate cloud vendor lock-in by employing cloud arbitrage, reverse auction, and follow-the-sun scenarios. The bottom line is you run your application in the cloud that provides the best performance, economics, availability, or some combination of these.
Four Trends Will Make it a Reality Within Two Years
We’ve reached a point in the sophistication and evolution of IT where cross-cloud replication is necessary to realize a multi-cloud environment. In fact, I predict cross-cloud replication will be commonplace among medium to larger organizations within two years. This accelerated adoption is fueled by four converging trends:
Infrastructure evolutions in private cloud. First, let’s start with a simple definition of a private cloud: virtualization of some form (be it VM- or container-based) combined with automation and self-service. Advances in microprocessor and memory architecture (whether HDD or SSD) make the virtualization side of private cloud more cost effective. Couple these with advances in cloud orchestration tools from Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos, and OpenStack and you have the automation and self-service. Building a private cloud with these elements creates an “AWS-like” foundation and cross-cloud replication then allows companies to move apps and services across private cloud data centers with ease.
Broad usage of multiple public cloud providers. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the 800-pound gorilla in this space so far, running close to $10 billion a year in revenue. But Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) have made impressive strides in the last several years. Wanting to avoid vendor lock-in, organizations will augment private clouds with at least two or more public cloud providers. In fact, a recent survey shows the average enterprise using six clouds (three public, three private). These organizations will either need cross-cloud replication to keep data synchronized or risk the onerous task of lifting and shifting infrastructure silos to a multitude of public clouds.
