In late 2021, EdgeConneX sponsored a research initiative by ESG (a division of TechTarget) to explore how organizations are striking the balance between cloud-native and legacy infrastructure. The research provides insight into “the state of contemporary application infrastructure environments, the trajectory of infrastructure strategies spanning both on- and off-premises locations, application strategies and the impact on infrastructure decisions, and the movement of applications and data across distributed cloud environments.”
Research objectives
“Whether organizations take a ‘cloud-first’ or a ‘cloud-when-it-makes-sense’ approach to their digital transformation initiatives, the number and variety of infrastructure options and locations continue to expand,” the report authors explain. “Specifically, IT operations teams remain challenged by building, maintaining, and operating a developer-ready infrastructure without impacting developer velocity, while simultaneously planning the future of monolithic applications by attempting to embrace new cloud-native architectures. As companies accelerate or embark on their digital transformation journeys, where and how will they build and host their production applications?”
“To gain insight into the state of application infrastructure modernization trends, including movement to public cloud services and the future of the data center, key reasons companies are using more than one cloud service provider, the rate at which organizations are moving to the public cloud, and expectations of and plans for on-premises data centers, ESG surveyed 372 IT professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) responsible for evaluating, purchasing, managing, and building application infrastructure.”
Download your free copy of the research report at https://go.edgeconnex.com/esg-research
Key findings
Container-driven transformation is fueling increased distribution of IT, survey respondents revealed. ESG explains, “Containers are quickly becoming the newest unit of measure for IT, previously held by virtual machines. Container adoption is fueling two major trends. First, containers are increasing the number and variety of sites, including cloud and on-premises, that IT must manage. Second, companies are leveraging container technology as a key component to providing both infrastructure and site independence for applications.”
This is the distributed architecture we described in User Experience is Everything (ALMOST). The internet as it is currently architected is not set up to cost efficiently deliver speed, power, and availability. So, what’s required is a re-architecture of the internet – the kind survey respondents reveal is underway. This is the Edge – distributed compute, storage, and/or network capacity at whatever scale and location you need to cost-efficiently deliver the best experience for your users – optimized for particular workloads given latency requirements and cost constraints. Peering at the edge and local gateways enable high-speed connectivity between edge deployments and to/from the core. (Find more resources on this topic, including an interactive ebook, at our User Experience content hub.)
ESG’s research reveals that the vast majority (86%) of organizations are leveraging more than one public cloud infrastructure service provider. Most (65%) leverage three or more providers. As ESG explains it, “This makes sense considering different regulatory environments, geographies, and support for applications.”
A multi-cloud approach is more important in some industries than others. ESG explains, “It’s not surprising that the three industries with the highest concentration of organizations with multi-cloud strategies are financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing, which all have traits that require data locality. Financial services firms tend to have regulatory requirements that necessitate data locality. Healthcare organizations
tend to have latency-sensitive applications that need to be closer to the user, such as PACS imaging systems. Manufacturing companies tend to be in countries with requirements or fears about data sovereignty, which is especially tricky with intellectual property.”
There are challenges, of course, and that’s where the hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem comes in. By facilitating hybrid multi-cloud ecosystems at the edge, EdgeConneX supports the service providers that support enterprises trying to make multi-cloud strategies work, enabling better performance and economics. (Learn more in our interactive ebook, The Cloud is Better at the Edge.)
The 21-page report reveals a range of other insights as well, including:
• Businesses take an ‘infrastructure-out’ approach to digital transformation
• Application modernization activities dominate IT strategy
• Container adoption facilitates increases in number of CSPs and application portability
• The data center lives on, but its future will be very different
Download your free copy of the research report at https://go.edgeconnex.com/esg-research