It is known to everyone that cloud computing is showing an upward trend in all aspects. Additionally, investments are flowing in the recent past. If you look at last year alone, investments in cloud computing enhanced by about 32% in 2021. (based on a survey by Gartner).
Industry observations and predictions by Gartner also confirm that worldwide spending on cloud services is expected to go beyond $482 billion by 2022. Way back in 2020, it was around $313 billion.
More investments are expected in the current year as well. In figures, towards the end of this year, the total assets are excepted to be more than $100 billion.
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Besides investments, the cloud-computing industry is undergoing rapid changes as well. One noticeable change would be the focus shift from AWS to multi-cloud options. As a result, multi-cloud storage will undoubtedly be one of the most impactful trends concerning enterprise storage in 2022 or even in the upcoming years.
The statistics indicate the exponential growth expected in the multi-cloud environment. It appears that towards the end of 2022, the overall multi-cloud storage market is expected to be worth around US$23.7 billion. And, by the end of the forecast period, i.e., between 2022 and 2032, the same industry will be valued at US$111.3 billion. (futuremarketinginsights.com).
Why the Sudden Surge in Multi-cloud?
The amount of data the contemporary business world has to handle is tremendous. The ability to successfully analyze and sort these data has become a crucial factor for success. Also, the considerable volume of data paves the way for increased data loss. The increased loss of critical data is what accelerated the demand for a versatile solution such as the multi-cloud.
When an enterprise decides to go ahead with the transition to multi-cloud, it has the liberty to leverage many cloud environments. It could be public, private, or hybrid cloud.
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Hybrid clouds could be dedicated to private clouds and public clouds for data and applications. This diversity empowers an enterprise to have more control over how and where the data is stored. In other words, organizations can have different storage options and the flexibility to choose the aptest one in accordance with an individual scenario.
With such a multi-cloud setup, enterprises are presented with several options for retrieving and storing data. Also, the popularity of multi-cloud as a shared storage option is increasing. All these factors have led to the surge and exponential growth of multi-cloud environments.
The multi-cloud storage empowers enterprises to adopt constantly altering IT environments to reduce the associated expenses and reliance on hardware and appliances.
In short, the reliance on one vendor is reduced, and the multi-cloud also imparts other benefits.
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As these aspects are critical for today’s IT environment, it can be assumed that cloud computing will undoubtedly be a persistent trend in the present and upcoming years.
The Geographical Factor
As of now, North America holds the most significant market share in multi-cloud storage. The other regions that follow include Europe and APAC. APAC and the European region are witnessing steady growth due to adopting cloud storage platforms from large and small-scale enterprises.
Right Strategy
It is essential to have a multi-cloud strategy in place for any organization to derive maximum benefits from the system. However, it wouldn’t be possible to have a generalized view of the right strategy as it is specific to an organization’s requirements and present and future situations.
It is imperative to carry out a careful analysis that compares the specific requirements of an enterprise before deciding on a multi-cloud system. Selecting the right multi-cloud is hardly easy as the weaknesses and strengths of any cloud service have to be analyzed. The areas that need enhancement as far as an enterprise is concerned should also be understood and thoroughly researched. There exist a plethora of options for a multi-cloud system.
The other aspect of multi-cloud is that an enterprise’s requirements concerning the cloud would constantly be altering or evolving. Of course, this applies to multi-cloud services as well. So, what turns essential in such a scenario is that your collaboration with the multi-cloud should always have a strong recoverability or disaster management and recovery option. Experts in the field suggest that these aspects should be independent of the multi-cloud system.
Namely the top players in the multi-cloud market include IBM, Google, VMware, EMC, and Microsoft.
Yet, the multi-cloud is not devoid of challenges. The most common concern is the way several enterprises transit to multi-cloud. The rapid transition often happens without adequate preparation. The stability is not constantly maintained, which is required for long-term multi-cloud implementation.
Also, most enterprises adopting enterprise multi-cloud platforms are looking for built-in security tools native to cloud providers. Again, this trend is happening across the cloud environment.