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