INTERVIEW
MAKING MULTICLOUD WORK RICHARD MUNRO, DIRECTOR, GLOBAL CLOUD STRATEGY, VMWARE, EXPLAINS WHY THE MULTICLOUD ERA IS HERE TO STAY.
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o you think this global pandemic has accelerated the adoption of the cloud among enterprises? The lasting impact of Covid-19 is just an acceleration. In most cases, it’s things that everyone knew they needed to do, and we knew we needed to do for a long time. But now, in the current situation, it’s been put to the top of the pile, because the pandemic and certain other factors all conspired to change the state of the market. Every organisation needs to adapt to that. Everyone’s completely having to rethink everything they do about their business, from what their supply chains look like, to their various routes to market. Whatever you’re looking at in that world, these concepts of digitalisation, digital transformation, and anything you want to do, you immediately start looking to leverage your technology 20
CXO INSIGHT ME
OCTOBER 2020
capability to provide more digital revenue streams or use digital to reduce cost. So they all automatically drive a desire for the cloud. Now, at the same time, that’s actually only half the story. The drive to cloud is normally because people are thinking, “Oh, well, I just need to be a bit faster to get these things done, or I need to reduce my cost because I’m out of cash constraint, or I need to scale up these services that previously were small, but now everything’s being done online, so scale them up.’’ But there’s also another side, which is the applications. People want to do brand new things. How do you do it? Well, you build or buy applications. Those applications that are coming in need to be deployed, built, managed, and secured simultaneously as you have all your existing applications. So, we’ve got this world where we have multiple application stacks that we urgently need to be able to innovate
with. Guess what? Modern application structures, particularly when you want to integrate them with existing things, drives multi-cloud as well. So multi-cloud and the modernisation of applications are both key business imperatives, but actually, they’re just two sides of the same coin. They both basically decide that we need a multicloud reality, and we need it urgently. The latest stats suggest that the percentage of enterprises that have moved workloads to the cloud is still below 50 percent, significantly lower than the earlier projections. Has cloud computing really achieved mainstream adoption? Stats are always interesting, but what is interesting is how you define the cloud. You genuinely can, very easily now, particularly with the announcements that we made at VMworld 2020. You cannot actually operate a genuine cloud service from
