Should our cloud-first strategy be cloud-only?
In short, no, says Mohan of TCS. Today’s organizations may find that hybrid or distributed cloud designs may make sense in situations with complex business, security, regulatory, or operational spending requirements. It’s about the right workload placement.
AI is also having an impact on these decisions. “Traditionally, enterprises pulled data to a centralized location for orchestration, production, and deriving value,” says Mohan. “With AI now being applied to wherever the data resides across the IT estate, organizations can drive more impactful edge use cases and outcomes.”
As such, CIO’s cloud strategies should consider hybrid and edge solutions. “With AI and cloud working together, CIOs can balance out their return on investment, since edge cloud reduces latency, improves reliability, lowers data transfer, and enables real-time decision-making, directly improving customer experience and ROI,” Mohan says.
What happens if we need to move to a different service or provider?
“In a time of rapid change and massive uncertainty it is critical for technology leaders to avoid technology dead ends. Sadly, it is hard to predict the form of those dead ends,” says Nickolaisen. “Anything in our world may be a barrier to agility — that includes cloud architecture and decisions.”
