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Multi-cloud environments have made it harder for enterprises to manage costs, Prosimo's Mehul Patel said
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The company is aiming to help businesses solve for that increased complexity
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The issue will continue to be an important one as AI helps drive increased migration to the cloud
Cloud costs continue to climb, but why exactly? Mehul Patel, head of Customer Insights and Intelligence at multi-cloud networking company Prosimo argued the answer is primarily related to increased complexity. But, he added, he believes that complexity is climbing for “the right reason.”
From rising cloud storage costs to price changes from vendors like IBM, the impacts are becoming increasingly ubiquitous as more businesses look to adopt hybrid infrastructure. Recent research from Gartner predicts worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services to grow 20.7% this year to reach nearly $600 billion.
Gartner VP Analyst Sid Nag said in a statement, “Current inflationary pressures and macroeconomic conditions are having a push and pull effect on cloud spending.” While he believes cloud spending could eventually decrease if IT budgets shrink, all segments are expected to see growth in 2023 — and “cloud migration is not stopping.”
But that migration means keeping track of more pieces — and moreover — how data moves throughout all those pieces.
“Before, [businesses] used to have one cloud, maybe one data center and one region, and all I had to do was across those two components,” Patel explained to Silverlinings. Infrastructure and workloads, however, now span multiple regions and, in many cases, multiple clouds.
“Whether it's because my developers are using another cloud or whether I've acquired a company or whether I've got a partner, I'm now having to operate and manage and control cost for a wider cloud footprint,” he continued.
“The complexity is like N plus N compounding, right? Complexity is increasing but for the right reason," said Patel.
Prosimo's recently released Cloud Cost 360 suite aims to help tackle this problem, increasing visibility into where exactly costs are coming from. The tool builds on the company’s multi-cloud networking (MCN) platform and also helps solve more advanced use cases — diving deeper into issues like security, compliance and policy management.
From Patel’s perspective, enterprise customers can largely be sorted into two “buckets.” The first are those who have adopted cloud infrastructure and already adjusted to this compounding complexity. “The second customer bucket is those customers that are, believe it or not, still there in the cloud, but they haven't quite adopted cloud mentality. They're still using legacy equipment and legacy ways of connecting,” he said.
That may have worked eight years ago, he said, citing the “Aviatrixes of the world, VMs of the world, all those guys doing it that way.” But the world has since moved on. “That model doesn't work.” Going cloud native has become “the only option” for enterprises that want to remain competitive and “future-proof” their systems and platforms.
Patel noted that while this larger migration has been in motion for a long time, artificial intelligence's (AI) popularization has added “fuel to the fire” as the technology has become a clear use case that enterprises are investigating. “It's asking the right questions for the infrastructure and the app team to make something happen,” he concluded.
Gartner's research seems to support that take. The firm stated emerging technologies like AI, Web3 and the metaverse are further propelling cloud adoption and transformation. Cloud offers “the perfect solution and platform” for the computing and data-processing requirements of AI.
“It is no coincidence that the key players in the generative AI race are cloud hyperscalers,” Nag stated.