Cloud solutions have evolved over the course of the last several years. A cloud is defined as a collection of servers, managed by cloud providers and accessed by customers over the Internet. A public cloud is shared by multiple customers and a multi-cloud consists of multiple public clouds. While the business and IT leaders have embraced the benefits of cloud infrastructures and the robust capability they provide, there are challenges. But for 2022, the solution may come in the next iteration of cloud services – the supercloud.
Research has shown that nearly every business in this country utilizes the multi-cloud, subscribing on average to 2.16 different cloud environments, such as Salesforce, AWS or Dropbox. This has caused complexity they could not have foreseen just a few short years ago. Most companies struggle with multiple challenges that are affecting security, performance, security, and visibility. Technology leaders and influencers alike have been recently suggesting a potential solution to all these woes – a ‘supercloud.’ The most standard definition of this admittedly new term involves platform normalization that enables consistent control over most of the multi-cloud challenges faced by IT.
Cornell University described the supercloud solution as follows:
“Supercloud is a cloud architecture that enables application migration as a service across different availability zones or cloud providers. The supercloud provides interfaces to allocate, migrate, and terminate resources such as virtual machines and storage and presents a homogeneous network to tie these resources together. The supercloud can span across all major public cloud providers such as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and Rackspace, etc., as well as private clouds.”
Vendors offering supercloud solutions often market them under the designation “distributed cloud”, which addresses the ability to consistently operate and monitor workloads and applications across multiple environments – in a uniform manner. Normalizing security policies and interfaces (APIs) across cloud and edge providers is a need that is rising to the top for good reason. As companies move forward into digital transformation and broaden their digital presence, they will be required to deploy distinct workloads globally in real-time. The multi-cloud confusion this will cause require a tangible and real solution. Whether identified as supercloud or distributed cloud, the solution will necessarily have to address the same need: simplifying business operations in a multi-cloud world and realizing the aspirational capabilities of the cloud: coherent migration, uniform security, and optimal performance.
Cloud computing is here to stay, as it should be – the benefits far outweigh the challenges, and permit businesses to enjoy economies of scale on many platforms. The supercloud is the next step in the evolution, but how it will be best implemented and utilized remains to be seen. For those companies who are unsure about how to best take advantage of the cloud’s strengths, expert advice may be necessary.
Managed services firms are uniquely positioned to explain the benefits of cloud services to your company, as well as to handle the migration of your platforms to these services. If you are interested in learning to streamline your operations through cloud services and the supercloud, call the experts at Alliance IT.
