In this article you will read,

• that, according to the IDC survey of June 2020, more than two-thirds of companies use a hybrid cloud,
• that managing multi and hybrid cloud infrastructures is a challenge, and
• how migration and orchestration tools and container services simplify cloud management.

When it comes to the question of the current use of the cloud, increasingly it is less a question of "if" than of "how." After all, only one in five companies in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland has no cloud strategy or has only recently started to focus on cloud services. By contrast, a good quarter of the companies actually regard the cloud as a central component of their digital transformation and regard business agility as a key benefit of the cloud. These are the results of an IDC market survey of more than 300 companies conducted in June 2020.

There is a clear trend among cloud intensive users towards hybrid cloud environments. Four out of five of the cloud users now rely on some form of hybrid multi cloud structure or plan to implement one in the future. These companies are convinced that they can flexibly move workloads and applications between cloud types according to their sensitivity and requirements, making the hybrid cloud "an integral, productive component of many IT environments and an important addition to many multi cloud strategies," the IDC analysts write.

Despite all the cloud euphoria, however, the IDC analysts throw a little sand into the cloud gearbox: in order to actually benefit from the advantages of hybrid and multi cloud environments, specific know-how is needed for the management of the multi cloud. And many companies still seem to lack this. "We observe that there is still a lack of ability or means to establish the necessary consistency and flexibility between environments, as well as the ability to manage this increasing complexity," say IDC analysts, who also warn: "The complexity of cloud environments will increase with the number of cloud services used and will require mechanisms on which the comprehensive management and provisioning of clouds and data takes place.”

What can be done to make sure that the increasing complexity does not eventually reduce all the advantages of the various public cloud offerings in combination with the private cloud components into absurdity? Who benefits from the flexibility if the applications and workloads do not interact in a largely automated manner and there is a risk of losing track? In addition to consolidated management and operations, virtualization technologies are at the top of the technological agenda. Other solutions include containers (23 percent), orchestration tools (22) and workload migration tools (27), each of which accounts for around a quarter of the companies surveyed by IDC. According to IDC, the rapid adaptation of containers continues unabated.

The Open Telekom Cloud and the current cloud services from T-Systems offer alternatives for getting to grips with the complexity and management. These include migration and orchestration tools and the use of containers that can be moved almost arbitrarily between the various cloud infrastructures. As a provider of hybrid cloud container services, companies can develop applications in containers and deploy and operate them on private and public cloud platforms as required, for example on the Future Cloud Infrastructure, the Open Telekom Cloud, AWS, and Azure. The advantage is that there are no investment costs for hardware and software licenses. 

The Open Telekom Cloud is particularly suitable for companies that want to use a private cloud for particularly business-critical applications and expand to a hybrid cloud with a public cloud. Both private and public clouds come from the Open Telekom Cloud. One advantage: The private cloud software architecture is based on OpenStack, the same open cloud standard as the public cloud. The hardware basis is also the same for the public and private cloud instances of the Open Telekom Cloud – which guarantees the best possible compatibility between the two instances. This is an advantage for the operation of a hybrid cloud infrastructure, as the Open Telekom Cloud Hybrid based on OpenStack is available as a plug & play solution, and data protection is automatically included, as it is operated entirely within the EU legal area under the provisions of the EU General Data Protection Regulation.

And for those who are just about to set up a multi cloud infrastructure, the first step should be to take stock of their entire IT and application landscape with T-Systems and determine which IT resources are in use where in the company and what project and operating costs are incurred. Only then does the establishment of a sustainable multi cloud cloud strategy for a digital future make sense.