GCP – IDC: A multicloud strategy can mitigate regulatory, business risks

In recent years, cloud has become an important driver for innovation, enhancing security and operational resilience, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the trend. But cloud adoption has been slower in regulated sectors including government agencies and financial institutions, due to the complexity of their legacy systems, cultural perceptions, and certain compliance challenges. In particular, the industry is focused on reducing vendor lock-in, concentration risk and over-reliance on third-party providers. 

To address these concerns, many regulated organizations are looking to implement innovative multi-vendor strategies. A multicloud approach lets them pick and choose cloud services from multiple cloud providers, helping to address commercial risks while providing more flexibility and choice. 

At Google Cloud, we are strong advocates of portability, interoperability and customer choice. To better understand the benefits as well as the challenges associated with a multicloud approach, we supported IDC in their work to produce a whitepaper that investigates how multicloud can help regulated organizations mitigate risks of using a single cloud vendor. The whitepaper looks at different approaches to multi-vendor and hybrid clouds taken by European organizations and how these strategies can help organizations address concentration risk and vendor-lock in, improve their compliance posture and demonstrate an exit strategy. Here’s a glimpse into the whitepaper’s findings:. 

• Open source and technologies such as containers, open APIs, and open source databases are enablers of multicloud. Containers and container orchestration services such as Kubernetes are the runaway favorites—at least 50% of organizations prefer to run databases on a container platform. A container-based multicloud architectural approach gives organizations the portability to build once and deploy across multiple cloud environments.

• One in three financial services organizations are increasing their public cloud spend to accelerate feature delivery for their end customers. Choosing a multicloud strategy enables them to address cloud concentration risk for critical financial technology while still prioritizing innovation.

• In the public sector, multicloud has become a preferred way to address regulatory concerns and leverage the best services from different providers. Unfortunately, many governments have grown their multicloud adoption organically, rather than strategically.

The whitepaper also offers recommendations for the regulated industries as well as policymakers to accelerate adoption of cloud and multi-vendor strategies in a secure and resilient way. To learn more about how regulated enterprises are adopting multicloud, you can download the IDC whitepaper or visit our multicloud solutions website.