Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 43 | Page 26

EDITOR’S QUESTION WHY IS MULTI-CLOUD ADOPTION BECOMING SO SUCCESSFUL ACROSS THE EMEA REGION? Research from F5 revealed earlier this year that the EMEA region leads the way for multi-cloud adoption, although security and skill gap challenges remain. According to the sixth annual State of Application Services (SOAS) report, 88% of surveyed EMEA organisations were leveraging multi-cloud environments, compared to 87% in the Americas and 86% in the APCJ region. A total of 27% of EMEA respondents also claimed they will have more than half of their applications in the cloud by the end of 2020. Meanwhile, 54% agreed that cloud in all its forms is the top strategic trend for the next two to five years. The SOAS report goes on to note that EMEA organisations were more likely than any other region to choose cloud platforms that support applications on a case-by-case basis, with 43% opting for the increasingly popular approach (compared to 42% worldwide). This chimes with the fact that 70% stated that it is ‘very important’ to be able to deploy and enforce the same security policies on-premises and in the cloud. In the Americas, 69% of respondents concurred, with APCJ slightly behind on 65%. “Inflexible, one-size-fits-all solutions won’t work anymore in the cloud, so it is encouraging to see that per-application strategies are becoming more widespread in EMEA,” said Brett Ley, Senior EMEA Cloud Director, F5. “Every application is unique and serves a specific function, such as finance, sales or production. Each will have end-users that scale from less than a hundred to into the millions. And each has a different risk exposure that can span from a breach being simply embarrassing to costing the business billions of dollars’ worth of damage.” A total of 33% of EMEA organisations cited regulatory compliance as the biggest challenge when managing applications in multi-cloud environments, which was once again higher than any other region and partly due to complexities stemming from the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Other pressing concerns included applying consistent security policies across all applications (30%), safeguarding against emerging threats (28%) and migrating applications between clouds and data centres (28%). When it comes to security postures, respondents reported lower confidence levels “ A TOTAL OF 27% OF EMEA RESPONDENTS ALSO CLAIMED THEY WILL HAVE MORE THAN HALF OF THEIR APPLICATIONS IN THE CLOUD BY THE END OF 2020. in their ability to withstand an applicationlayer attack in the public cloud (only 15% were ‘very confident’ they could do so), versus in an on-premises data centre (30%) or via colocation deployments (20%). The cloud security challenge is further exacerbated by a growing industry skill gap: as many as 66% of EMEA organisations believe they lack necessary security talent going forward. America is closely behind with 65% having claimed the same. The problem was most pronounced in the APJC region where it was an issue for 76%. 26 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com