Decisions to make on the road to multicloud

Your organization has servers that need to be replaced, end-of-support software and no capital budget for upgrades. What are your options?

You could use a cloud provider, thereby converting the capital expenses of upgrading and maintaining your systems and software to an operating expense in the pay-as-you-go public-cloud environment. In which case, does your organization have the expertise to choose the best provider for your workloads and perform the cloud migration?

There are also other factors to consider.

As part of your cloud strategy, you should evaluate your workloads and determine a proper cloud migration path. In selecting a cloud provider, consider your application and data security needs as well as your compliance and regulatory requirements. 

Choose the right cloud for your requirements

Public-cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle provide consumption-based services, and you’re not limited to only a single provider.

Many organizations take a multicloud approach to decrease their exposure to vendor lock-in, using a mix of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud, virtualization and public-cloud providers, depending on their application and data requirements.

In NTT’s 2022–23 Global Network Report, 75% of organizations classified as top performers in the research study have implemented multicloud networking compared with about 40% of those classified as underperformers.

Rely on a partner for multicloud expertise

Once your organization has embarked on a multicloud strategy, how will you secure your data, network and application architecture? How will you monitor, manage and maintain your multicloud environment?

Public-cloud providers make it clear that they are not in the business of application-environment support. Organizations therefore retain responsibility for their data and applications. Yet, you may find it challenging to hire and retain talent with multicloud skills.

To optimize your multicloud strategy, you therefore need a partner that can guide you in analyzing, migrating to and supporting these services.

A comprehensive managed service provider (MSP) will help you create a migration roadmap to the best cloud environment for your workloads. They’ll also provide ongoing support that includes monitoring, updating, and compliance and security management, along with periodic cost analyses comparing cloud-vendor services.

In this way, your organization gains ongoing support, follows best practices and extends know-how without the need to increase internal resources. The MSP becomes an extension of your information technology team.

When you’re choosing an MSP, verify their capabilities and discuss the processes they will follow to manage and secure your applications and data.

Apart from your employees, your data is your most important resource. Work with an MSP that shares that perspective so you can move to a multicloud environment with confidence.

Contact our multicloud professionals to start your multicloud journey.

Mark Paterson is Senior Vice President, MCIS: Go-to-Market and Product at NTT