Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 78 | Page 39

CIO OPINION
Cloud mobility
The value of a multi-cloud strategy is in the flexibility and freedom to access your data from anywhere and at any time . The primary risk in realising this potential is in commercial and technical lock-in . If your cloud provider changes their pricing model , are you commercially locked in , or can you seamlessly migrate workloads and applications ? up the financial aftermath of successful application launches . Providing visibility to your application and service owners is the first step to reigning in spend and protecting against ballooning costs .
Think about an apartment complex that includes the cost of utilities as part of the monthly rate . How closely would you monitor your electricity or water usage if you never receive a bill ?
If the next global news headline has you concerned about data privacy and security , does your team have the skills to adopt a new cloud architecture ?
By designing and refactoring with mobility in mind , you can easily move applications between clouds without requiring significant changes to the underlying architecture , thus reducing the risk of being contingent on a particular provider .
Maintaining mobility also offers benefits such as empowering developers to choose the right cloud for the right app , leveraging best-in-class AI and ML capabilities for cross-cloud analysis and mitigation , and enabling anywhere work for employees all over the world while complying with data sovereignty regulations .
Cloud spending
Rising cloud costs can be the Achilles heel of app innovation . While developers drive demand for multi-cloud technology , CIOs are often left to clean
With visibility comes accountability and while previously applications owners could only optimise for security , scale , and availability , today , they can now also optimise for cost .
With cloud management solutions , application owners can share in the responsibility of managing spend by looking for patterns and identifying opportunities to reduce spend . Just last year we filed a patent for an automatic cloud dimmer switch that reduces and redeploys cloud resources the moment they are no longer needed . This innovation has not only reduced spend but saved in energy consumption .
Multi-cloud has emerged as one of the most effective ways for organisations around the globe to sharpen their competitive edge .
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