The early days of cloud
computing in the enterprise featured prediction after prediction of a winner
between public cloud vs. private cloud and even of specific cloud platforms
within those environments. As we enter 2019, it’s becoming abundantly clear that
all those arguments were wrong headed and that, in fact, everyone won and
everyone lost at the same time.
Amazon currently leads
overall cloud computing, but depending on the type of workload or other
requirements, Microsoft’s Azure, Google’s GCP (Google Cloud Platform), or IBM,
Oracle, or SAP cloud offerings might all make sense.The real winner is the
cloud computing model, regardless of where or by whom it’s being hosted. Not
only has cloud computing changed expectations about performance, reliability,
and security, the DevOps software development environment it inspired and the
container-focused application architecture it enabled have radically reshaped
how software is written, updated, and deployed.
That’s why you see companies
shifting their focus away from the public infrastructure-based aspects of cloud
computing and towards the flexible software environments it enables. This, in
turn, is why companies have recognized that leveraging multiple cloud types and
cloud vendors isn’t a weakness or disjointed strategy, but actually a strength
that can be leveraged for future endeavors. With cloud platform vendors
expected to work towards more interoperability (and transportability) of
workloads across different platforms in 2019, it’s very clear that the
multi-cloud world is here to stay.
